Lady Justice, a goddess symbolising justice who bears a sword – symbolising the coercive power of a tribunal –, scales – representing an objective standard by which competing claims are weighed – and a blindfold indicating that justice should be impartial and meted out objectively, without fear or favor and regardless of money, wealth, power or identity.[1]

Law is a system of rules that are created and enforced through social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior.[2] Law is a system that regulates and ensures that individuals or a community adhere to the will of the state. State-enforced laws can be made by a collective legislature or by a single legislator, resulting in statutes, by the executive through decrees and regulations, or established by judges through precedent, normally in common law jurisdictions. Private individuals can create legally binding contracts, including arbitration agreements that may elect to accept alternative arbitration to the normal court process, the formation of laws themselves may be influenced by a constitution, written or tacit, and the rights encoded therein. The law shapes politics, economics, history and society in various ways and serves as a mediator of relations between people.

A general distinction can be made between (a) civil lawjurisdictions, in which a legislature or other central body codifies and consolidates their laws, and (b) common law systems, where judge-made precedent is accepted as binding law. Historically, religious laws played a significant role even in settling of secular matters, and is still used in some religious communities. Islamic Sharia law is the world's most widely used religious law, and is used as the primary legal system in some countries, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia.[3]

The adjudication of the law is generally divided into two main areas. Criminal law deals with conduct that is considered harmful to social order and in which the guilty party may be imprisoned or fined. Civil law (not to be confused with civil law jurisdictions above) deals with the resolution of lawsuits (disputes) between individuals or organizations.[4]

Numerous definitions of law have been put forward over the centuries, the Third New International Dictionary from Merriam-Webster[5] defines law as: "Law is a binding custom or practice of a community; a rule or mode of conduct or action that is prescribed or formally recognized as binding by a supreme controlling authority or is made obligatory by a sanction (as an edict, decree, rescript, order, ordinance, statute, resolution, rule, judicial decision, or usage) made, recognized, or enforced by the controlling authority."

The Dictionary of the History of Ideas published by Scribner's in 1973 defined the concept of law accordingly as: "A legal system is the most explicit, institutionalized, and complex mode of regulating human conduct. At the same time, it plays only one part in the congeries of rules which influence behavior, for social and moral rules of a less institutionalized kind are also of great importance."[6]

There have been several attempts to produce "a universally acceptable definition of law"; in 1972, one source indicated that no such definition could be produced.[7] McCoubrey and White said that the question "what is law?" has no simple answer.[8]Glanville Williams said that the meaning of the word "law" depends on the context in which that word is used. He said that, for example, "early customary law" and "municipal law" were contexts where the word "law" had two different and irreconcilable meanings.[9]Thurman Arnold said that it is obvious that it is impossible to define the word "law" and that it is also equally obvious that the struggle to define that word should not ever be abandoned.[10] It is possible to take the view that there is no need to define the word "law" (e.g. "let's forget about generalities and get down to cases").[11]

The history of law links closely to the development of civilization. Ancient Egyptian law, dating as far back as 3000 BC, contained a civil code that was probably broken into twelve books. It was based on the concept of Ma'at, characterised by tradition, rhetorical speech, social equality and impartiality.[12][13] By the 22nd century BC, the ancient Sumerian ruler Ur-Nammu had formulated the first law code, which consisted of casuistic statements ("if … then ..."). Around 1760 BC, King Hammurabi further developed Babylonian law, by codifying and inscribing it in stone. Hammurabi placed several copies of his law code throughout the kingdom of Babylon as stelae, for the entire public to see; this became known as the Codex Hammurabi. The most intact copy of these stelae was discovered in the 19th century by British Assyriologists, and has since been fully transliterated and translated into various languages, including English, Italian, German, and French.[14]

The Old Testament dates back to 1280 BC and takes the form of moral imperatives as recommendations for a good society. The small Greek city-state, ancient Athens, from about the 8th century BC was the first society to be based on broad inclusion of its citizenry, excluding women and the slave class. However, Athens had no legal science or single word for "law",[15] relying instead on the three-way distinction between divine law (thémis), human decree (nomos) and custom (díkē).[16] Yet Ancient Greek law contained major constitutional innovations in the development of democracy.[17]

Roman law was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, but its detailed rules were developed by professional jurists and were highly sophisticated.[18][19] Over the centuries between the rise and decline of the Roman Empire, law was adapted to cope with the changing social situations and underwent major codification under Theodosius II and Justinian I.[20] Although codes were replaced by custom and case law during the Dark Ages, Roman law was rediscovered around the 11th century when medieval legal scholars began to research Roman codes and adapt their concepts. Latin legal maxims (called brocards) were compiled for guidance; in medieval England, royal courts developed a body of precedent which later became the common law. A Europe-wide Law Merchant was formed so that merchants could trade with common standards of practice rather than with the many splintered facets of local laws, the Law Merchant, a precursor to modern commercial law, emphasised the freedom to contract and alienability of property.[21] As nationalism grew in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Law Merchant was incorporated into countries' local law under new civil codes, the Napoleonic and German Codes became the most influential. In contrast to English common law, which consists of enormous tomes of case law, codes in small books are easy to export and easy for judges to apply. However, today there are signs that civil and common law are converging.[22] EU law is codified in treaties, but develops through the precedent laid down by the European Court of Justice.

The Constitution of India is the longest written constitution for a country, containing 444 articles, 12 schedules, numerous amendments and 117,369 words.

Ancient India and China represent distinct traditions of law, and have historically had independent schools of legal theory and practice, the Arthashastra, probably compiled around 100 AD (although it contains older material), and the Manusmriti (c. 100–300 AD) were foundational treatises in India, and comprise texts considered authoritative legal guidance.[23] Manu's central philosophy was tolerance and pluralism, and was cited across Southeast Asia,[24] this Hindu tradition, along with Islamic law, was supplanted by the common law when India became part of the British Empire.[25] Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Hong Kong also adopted the common law, the eastern Asia legal tradition reflects a unique blend of secular and religious influences.[26] Japan was the first country to begin modernising its legal system along western lines, by importing bits of the French, but mostly the German Civil Code,[27] this partly reflected Germany's status as a rising power in the late 19th century. Similarly, traditional Chinese law gave way to westernisation towards the final years of the Qing Dynasty in the form of six private law codes based mainly on the Japanese model of German law.[28] Today Taiwanese law retains the closest affinity to the codifications from that period, because of the split between Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists, who fled there, and Mao Zedong's communists who won control of the mainland in 1949. The current legal infrastructure in the People's Republic of China was heavily influenced by SovietSocialist law, which essentially inflates administrative law at the expense of private law rights.[29] Due to rapid industrialisation, today China is undergoing a process of reform, at least in terms of economic, if not social and political, rights. A new contract code in 1999 represented a move away from administrative domination.[30] Furthermore, after negotiations lasting fifteen years, in 2001 China joined the World Trade Organisation.[31]

"But what, after all, is a law? […] When I say that the object of laws is always general, I mean that law considers subjects en masse and actions in the abstract, and never a particular person or action. […] On this view, we at once see that it can no longer be asked whose business it is to make laws, since they are acts of the general will; nor whether the prince is above the law, since he is a member of the State; nor whether the law can be unjust, since no one is unjust to himself; nor how we can be both free and subject to the laws, since they are but registers of our wills."

The philosophy of law is commonly known as jurisprudence. Normative jurisprudence asks "what should law be?", while analytic jurisprudence asks "what is law?" John Austin's utilitarian answer was that law is "commands, backed by threat of sanctions, from a sovereign, to whom people have a habit of obedience".[33]Natural lawyers on the other side, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argue that law reflects essentially moral and unchangeable laws of nature. The concept of "natural law" emerged in ancient Greek philosophy concurrently and in connection with the notion of justice, and re-entered the mainstream of Western culture through the writings of Thomas Aquinas, notably his Treatise on Law.

Hugo Grotius, the founder of a purely rationalistic system of natural law, argued that law arises from both a social impulse—as Aristotle had indicated—and reason.[34]Immanuel Kant believed a moral imperative requires laws "be chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature".[35]Jeremy Bentham and his student Austin, following David Hume, believed that this conflated the "is" and what "ought to be" problem. Bentham and Austin argued for law's positivism; that real law is entirely separate from "morality".[36] Kant was also criticised by Friedrich Nietzsche, who rejected the principle of equality, and believed that law emanates from the will to power, and cannot be labelled as "moral" or "immoral".[37][38][39]

In 1934, the Austrian philosopher Hans Kelsen continued the positivist tradition in his book the Pure Theory of Law.[40] Kelsen believed that although law is separate from morality, it is endowed with "normativity", meaning we ought to obey it. While laws are positive "is" statements (e.g. the fine for reversing on a highway is €500); law tells us what we "should" do. Thus, each legal system can be hypothesised to have a basic norm (Grundnorm) instructing us to obey. Kelsen's major opponent, Carl Schmitt, rejected both positivism and the idea of the rule of law because he did not accept the primacy of abstract normative principles over concrete political positions and decisions.[41] Therefore, Schmitt advocated a jurisprudence of the exception (state of emergency), which denied that legal norms could encompass all of political experience.[42]

Bentham's utilitarian theories remained dominant in law until the 20th century.

Later in the 20th century, H. L. A. Hart attacked Austin for his simplifications and Kelsen for his fictions in The Concept of Law.[43] Hart argued law is a system of rules, divided into primary (rules of conduct) and secondary ones (rules addressed to officials to administer primary rules). Secondary rules are further divided into rules of adjudication (to resolve legal disputes), rules of change (allowing laws to be varied) and the rule of recognition (allowing laws to be identified as valid). Two of Hart's students continued the debate: In his book Law's Empire, Ronald Dworkin attacked Hart and the positivists for their refusal to treat law as a moral issue. Dworkin argues that law is an "interpretive concept",[44] that requires judges to find the best fitting and most just solution to a legal dispute, given their constitutional traditions. Joseph Raz, on the other hand, defended the positivist outlook and criticised Hart's "soft social thesis" approach in The Authority of Law.[45] Raz argues that law is authority, identifiable purely through social sources and without reference to moral reasoning; in his view, any categorisation of rules beyond their role as authoritative instruments in mediation are best left to sociology, rather than jurisprudence.[46]

One definition is that law is a system of rules and guidelines which are enforced through social institutions to govern behaviour;[2] in The Concept of Law Hart argued law is a "system of rules";[47] Austin said law was "the command of a sovereign, backed by the threat of a sanction";[33] Dworkin describes law as an "interpretive concept" to achieve justice in his text titled Law's Empire;[48] and Raz argues law is an "authority" to mediate people's interests.[45] Holmes said "The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law."[49] In his Treatise on Law Aquinas argues that law is a rational ordering of things which concern the common good that is promulgated by whoever is charged with the care of the community,[50] this definition has both positivist and naturalist elements.[51]

The most prominent economic analyst of law is 1991 Nobel Prize winner Ronald Coase, whose first major article, The Nature of the Firm (1937), argued that the reason for the existence of firms (companies, partnerships, etc.) is the existence of transaction costs.[55]Rational individuals trade through bilateral contracts on open markets until the costs of transactions mean that using corporations to produce things is more cost-effective. His second major article, The Problem of Social Cost (1960), argued that if we lived in a world without transaction costs, people would bargain with one another to create the same allocation of resources, regardless of the way a court might rule in property disputes.[56] Coase used the example of a nuisance case named Sturges v Bridgman, where a noisy sweetmaker and a quiet doctor were neighbours and went to court to see who should have to move.[57] Coase said that regardless of whether the judge ruled that the sweetmaker had to stop using his machinery, or that the doctor had to put up with it, they could strike a mutually beneficial bargain about who moves that reaches the same outcome of resource distribution. Only the existence of transaction costs may prevent this.[58] So the law ought to pre-empt what would happen, and be guided by the most efficient solution, the idea is that law and regulation are not as important or effective at helping people as lawyers and government planners believe.[59] Coase and others like him wanted a change of approach, to put the burden of proof for positive effects on a government that was intervening in the market, by analysing the costs of action.[60]

Sociology of law is a diverse field of study that examines the interaction of law with society and overlaps with jurisprudence, philosophy of law, social theory and more specialised subjects such as criminology,[61] the institutions of social construction, social norms, dispute processing and legal culture are key areas for inquiry in this knowledge field. Sociology of law is sometimes seen as a sub-discipline of sociology, but its ties to the academic discipline of law are equally strong, and it is best seen as a transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary study focused on the theorisation and empirical study of legal practices and experiences as social phenomena; in the United States the field is usually called law and society studies; in Europe it is more often referred to as socio-legal studies. At first, jurists and legal philosophers were suspicious of sociology of law. Kelsen attacked one of its founders, Eugen Ehrlich, who sought to make clear the differences and connections between positive law, which lawyers learn and apply, and other forms of 'law' or social norms that regulate everyday life, generally preventing conflicts from reaching barristers and courts.[62] Contemporary research in sociology of law is much concerned with the way that law is developing outside discrete state jurisdictions, being produced through social interaction in many different kinds of social arenas, and acquiring a diversity of sources of (often competing or conflicting) authority in communal networks existing sometimes within nation states but increasingly also transnationally.[63]

Max Weber in 1917, Weber began his career as a lawyer, and is regarded as one of the founders of sociology and sociology of law.

Around 1900 Max Weber defined his "scientific" approach to law, identifying the "legal rational form" as a type of domination, not attributable to personal authority but to the authority of abstract norms.[64] Formal legal rationality was his term for the key characteristic of the kind of coherent and calculable law that was a precondition for modern political developments and the modern bureaucratic state. Weber saw this law as having developed in parallel with the growth of capitalism.[61] Another leading sociologist, Émile Durkheim, wrote in his classic work The Division of Labour in Society that as society becomes more complex, the body of civil law concerned primarily with restitution and compensation grows at the expense of criminal laws and penal sanctions.[65] Other notable early legal sociologists included Hugo Sinzheimer, Theodor Geiger, Georges Gurvitch and Leon Petrażycki in Europe, and William Graham Sumner in the U.S.[66][67]

In general, legal systems can be split between civil law and common law systems,[68] the term "civil law" referring to a legal system should not be confused with "civil law" as a group of legal subjects distinct from criminal or public law. A third type of legal system—accepted by some countries without separation of church and state—is religious law, based on scriptures, the specific system that a country is ruled by is often determined by its history, connections with other countries, or its adherence to international standards. The sources that jurisdictions adopt as authoritatively binding are the defining features of any legal system. Yet classification is a matter of form rather than substance, since similar rules often prevail.

Civil law is the legal system used in most countries around the world today; in civil law the sources recognised as authoritative are, primarily, legislation—especially codifications in constitutions or statutes passed by government—and custom.[69] Codifications date back millennia, with one early example being the BabylonianCodex Hammurabi. Modern civil law systems essentially derive from the legal practice of the 6th-century Eastern Roman Empire whose texts were rediscovered by late medieval Western Europe. Roman law in the days of the Roman Republic and Empire was heavily procedural, and lacked a professional legal class.[70] Instead a lay magistrate, iudex, was chosen to adjudicate. Decisions were not published in any systematic way, so any case law that developed was disguised and almost unrecognised,[71] each case was to be decided afresh from the laws of the State, which mirrors the (theoretical) unimportance of judges' decisions for future cases in civil law systems today. From 529–534 AD the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I codified and consolidated Roman law up until that point, so that what remained was one-twentieth of the mass of legal texts from before,[72] this became known as the Corpus Juris Civilis. As one legal historian wrote, "Justinian consciously looked back to the golden age of Roman law and aimed to restore it to the peak it had reached three centuries before."[73] The Justinian Code remained in force in the East until the fall of the Byzantine Empire. Western Europe, meanwhile, relied on a mix of the Theodosian Code and Germanic customary law until the Justinian Code was rediscovered in the 11th century, and scholars at the University of Bologna used it to interpret their own laws.[74] Civil law codifications based closely on Roman law, alongside some influences from religious laws such as canon law, continued to spread throughout Europe until the Enlightenment; then, in the 19th century, both France, with the Code Civil, and Germany, with the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, modernised their legal codes. Both these codes influenced heavily not only the law systems of the countries in continental Europe (e.g. Greece), but also the Japanese and Korean legal traditions.[75][76] Today, countries that have civil law systems range from Russia and China to most of Central and Latin America.[77] With the exception of Louisiana's Civil Code, the United States follows the common law system described below.

In common law legal systems, decisions by courts are explicitly acknowledged as "law" on equal footing with statutes adopted through the legislative process and with regulations issued by the executive branch. The "doctrine of precedent", or stare decisis (Latin for "to stand by decisions") means that decisions by higher courts bind lower courts, and future decisions of the same court, to assure that similar cases reach similar results; in contrast, in "civil law" systems, legislative statutes are typically more detailed, and judicial decisions are shorter and less detailed, because the judge or barrister is only writing to decide the single case, rather than to set out reasoning that will guide future courts.

Common law originated from England and has been inherited by almost every country once tied to the British Empire (except Malta, Scotland, the U.S. state of Louisiana, and the Canadian province of Quebec). In medieval England, the Norman conquest the law varied-shire-to-shire, based on disparate tribal customs, the concept of a "common law" developed during the reign of Henry II during the late 12th century, when Henry appointed judges that had authority to create an institutionalized and unified system of law "common" to the country. The next major step in the evolution of the common law came when King John was forced by his barons to sign a document limiting his authority to pass laws, this "great charter" or Magna Carta of 1215 also required that the King's entourage of judges hold their courts and judgments at "a certain place" rather than dispensing autocratic justice in unpredictable places about the country.[78] A concentrated and elite group of judges acquired a dominant role in law-making under this system, and compared to its European counterparts the English judiciary became highly centralized; in 1297, for instance, while the highest court in France had fifty-one judges, the English Court of Common Pleas had five.[79] This powerful and tight-knit judiciary gave rise to a systematized process of developing common law.[80]

However, the system became overly systematized—overly rigid and inflexible, as a result, as time went on, increasing numbers of citizens petitioned the King to override the common law, and on the King's behalf the Lord Chancellor gave judgment to do what was equitable in a case. From the time of Sir Thomas More, the first lawyer to be appointed as Lord Chancellor, a systematic body of equity grew up alongside the rigid common law, and developed its own Court of Chancery. At first, equity was often criticized as erratic, that it varied according to the length of the Chancellor's foot,[81] over time, courts of equity developed solid principles, especially under Lord Eldon.[82] In the 19th century in England, and in 1937 in the U.S., the two systems were merged.

In developing the common law, academic writings have always played an important part, both to collect overarching principles from dispersed case law, and to argue for change. William Blackstone, from around 1760, was the first scholar to collect, describe, and teach the common law.[83] But merely in describing, scholars who sought explanations and underlying structures slowly changed the way the law actually worked.[84]

Religious law is explicitly based on religious precepts. Examples include the Jewish Halakha and Islamic Sharia—both of which translate as the "path to follow"—while Christian canon law also survives in some church communities. Often the implication of religion for law is unalterability, because the word of God cannot be amended or legislated against by judges or governments.[citation needed] However a thorough and detailed legal system generally requires human elaboration, for instance, the Quran has some law, and it acts as a source of further law through interpretation,[85]Qiyas (reasoning by analogy), Ijma (consensus) and precedent. This is mainly contained in a body of law and jurisprudence known as Sharia and Fiqh respectively. Another example is the Torah or Old Testament, in the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses. This contains the basic code of Jewish law, which some Israeli communities choose to use, the Halakha is a code of Jewish law which summarises some of the Talmud's interpretations. Nevertheless, Israeli law allows litigants to use religious laws only if they choose. Canon law is only in use by members of the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Anglican Communion.

A trial in the Ottoman Empire, 1879, when religious law applied under the Mecelle

Until the 18th century, Sharia law was practiced throughout the Muslim world in a non-codified form, with the Ottoman Empire's Mecelle code in the 19th century being a first attempt at codifying elements of Sharia law. Since the mid-1940s, efforts have been made, in country after country, to bring Sharia law more into line with modern conditions and conceptions;[86][87] in modern times, the legal systems of many Muslim countries draw upon both civil and common law traditions as well as Islamic law and custom. The constitutions of certain Muslim states, such as Egypt and Afghanistan, recognise Islam as the religion of the state, obliging legislature to adhere to Sharia.[88] Saudi Arabia recognises Quran as its constitution, and is governed on the basis of Islamic law.[89] Iran has also witnessed a reiteration of Islamic law into its legal system after 1979,[90] during the last few decades, one of the fundamental features of the movement of Islamic resurgence has been the call to restore the Sharia, which has generated a vast amount of literature and affected world politics.[91]

It is a real unity of them all in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such manner as if every man should say to every man: I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou givest up, thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner.

Max Weber and others reshaped thinking on the extension of state. Modern military, policing and bureaucratic power over ordinary citizens' daily lives pose special problems for accountability that earlier writers such as Locke or Montesquieu could not have foreseen, the custom and practice of the legal profession is an important part of people's access to justice, whilst civil society is a term used to refer to the social institutions, communities and partnerships that form law's political basis.

A judiciary is a number of judges mediating disputes to determine outcome. Most countries have systems of appeal courts, answering up to a supreme legal authority; in the United States, this authority is the Supreme Court;[94] in Australia, the High Court; in the UK, the Supreme Court;[95] in Germany, the Bundesverfassungsgericht; and in France, the Cour de Cassation.[96][97] For most European countries the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg can overrule national law, when EU law is relevant, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg allows citizens of the Council of Europe member states to bring cases relating to human rights issues before it.[98]

A judiciary is theoretically bound by the constitution, just as all other government bodies are; in most countries judges may only interpret the constitution and all other laws. But in common law countries, where matters are not constitutional, the judiciary may also create law under the doctrine of precedent, the UK, Finland and New Zealand assert the ideal of parliamentary sovereignty, whereby the unelected judiciary may not overturn law passed by a democratic legislature.[100]

In communist states, such as China, the courts are often regarded as parts of the executive, or subservient to the legislature; governmental institutions and actors exert thus various forms of influence on the judiciary.[101] In Muslim countries, courts often examine whether state laws adhere to the Sharia: the Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt may invalidate such laws,[102] and in Iran the Guardian Council ensures the compatibility of the legislation with the "criteria of Islam".[102][103]

In the 'lower house' politicians are elected to represent smaller constituencies, the 'upper house' is usually elected to represent states in a federal system (as in Australia, Germany or the United States) or different voting configuration in a unitary system (as in France). In the UK the upper house is appointed by the government as a house of review. One criticism of bicameral systems with two elected chambers is that the upper and lower houses may simply mirror one another, the traditional justification of bicameralism is that an upper chamber acts as a house of review. This can minimise arbitrariness and injustice in governmental action.[104]

To pass legislation, a majority of the members of a legislature must vote for a bill (proposed law) in each house. Normally there will be several readings and amendments proposed by the different political factions. If a country has an entrenched constitution, a special majority for changes to the constitution may be required, making changes to the law more difficult. A government usually leads the process, which can be formed from Members of Parliament (e.g. the UK or Germany). However, in a presidential system, the government is usually formed by an executive and his or her appointed cabinet officials (e.g. the United States or Brazil).[105]

The G20 meetings are composed of representatives of each country's executive branch.

The executive in a legal system serves as the centre of political authority of the State; in a parliamentary system, as with Britain, Italy, Germany, India, and Japan, the executive is known as the cabinet, and composed of members of the legislature. The executive is led by the head of government, whose office holds power under the confidence of the legislature, because popular elections appoint political parties to govern, the leader of a party can change in between elections.[106]

Although the role of the executive varies from country to country, usually it will propose the majority of legislation, and propose government agenda; in presidential systems, the executive often has the power to veto legislation. Most executives in both systems are responsible for foreign relations, the military and police, and the bureaucracy. Ministers or other officials head a country's public offices, such as a foreign ministry or defence ministry. The election of a different executive is therefore capable of revolutionising an entire country's approach to government.

While military organisations have existed as long as government itself, the idea of a standing police force is a relatively modern concept, for example, Medieval England's system of traveling criminal courts, or assizes, used show trials and public executions to instill communities with fear to maintain control.[108] The first modern police were probably those in 17th-century Paris, in the court of Louis XIV,[109] although the Paris Prefecture of Police claim they were the world's first uniformed policemen.[110]

Max Weber famously argued that the state is that which controls the monopoly on the legitimate use of force.[111][112] The military and police carry out enforcement at the request of the government or the courts, the term failed state refers to states that cannot implement or enforce policies; their police and military no longer control security and order and society moves into anarchy, the absence of government.[113]

The United Nations' New York headquarters houses civil servants that serve its 193 member states.

The etymology of "bureaucracy" derives from the French word for "office" (bureau) and the Ancient Greek for word "power" (kratos).[114] Like the military and police, a legal system's government servants and bodies that make up its bureaucracy carry out the directives of the executive. One of the earliest references to the concept was made by Baron de Grimm, a German author who lived in France; in 1765 he wrote,

The real spirit of the laws in France is that bureaucracy of which the late Monsieur de Gournay used to complain so greatly; here the offices, clerks, secretaries, inspectors and intendants are not appointed to benefit the public interest, indeed the public interest appears to have been established so that offices might exist.[115]

Cynicism over "officialdom" is still common, and the workings of public servants is typically contrasted to private enterprise motivated by profit;[116] in fact private companies, especially large ones, also have bureaucracies.[117] Negative perceptions of "red tape" aside, public services such as schooling, health care, policing or public transport are considered a crucial state function making public bureaucratic action the locus of government power.[117]

Writing in the early 20th century, Max Weber believed that a definitive feature of a developed state had come to be its bureaucratic support.[118] Weber wrote that the typical characteristics of modern bureaucracy are that officials define its mission, the scope of work is bound by rules, and management is composed of career experts who manage top down, communicating through writing and binding public servants' discretion with rules.[119]

In civil law systems such as those of Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Greece, there is a distinct category of notary, a legally trained public official, compensated by the parties to a transaction.[120] This is a 16th-century painting of such a notary by Flemish painter Quentin Massys.

A corollary of the rule of law is the existence of a legal profession sufficiently autonomous to invoke the authority of the independent judiciary; the right to assistance of a barrister in a court proceeding emanates from this corollary—in England the function of barrister or advocate is distinguished from legal counselor.[121] As the European Court of Human Rights has stated, the law should be adequately accessible to everyone and people should be able to foresee how the law affects them.[122]

Many Muslim countries have developed similar rules about legal education and the legal profession, but some still allow lawyers with training in traditional Islamic law to practice law before personal status law courts;[125] in China and other developing countries there are not sufficient professionally trained people to staff the existing judicial systems, and, accordingly, formal standards are more relaxed.[126]

Once accredited, a lawyer will often work in a law firm, in a chambers as a sole practitioner, in a government post or in a private corporation as an internal counsel. In addition a lawyer may become a legal researcher who provides on-demand legal research through a library, a commercial service or freelance work. Many people trained in law put their skills to use outside the legal field entirely.[127]

Significant to the practice of law in the common law tradition is the legal research to determine the current state of the law, this usually entails exploring case-law reports, legal periodicals and legislation. Law practice also involves drafting documents such as court pleadings, persuasive briefs, contracts, or wills and trusts. Negotiation and dispute resolution skills (including ADR techniques) are also important to legal practice, depending on the field.[127]

Hegel believed that civil society and the state were polar opposites, within the scheme of his dialectic theory of history, the modern dipole state–civil society was reproduced in the theories of Alexis de Tocqueville and Karl Marx.[131][132] Nowadays in post-modern theory civil society is necessarily a source of law, by being the basis from which people form opinions and lobby for what they believe law should be, as Australian barrister and author Geoffrey Robertson QC wrote of international law,

… one of its primary modern sources is found in the responses of ordinary men and women, and of the non-governmental organizations which many of them support, to the human rights abuses they see on the television screen in their living rooms.[133]

Freedom of speech, freedom of association and many other individual rights allow people to gather, discuss, criticise and hold to account their governments, from which the basis of a deliberative democracy is formed. The more people are involved with, concerned by and capable of changing how political power is exercised over their lives, the more acceptable and legitimate the law becomes to the people, the most familiar institutions of civil society include economic markets, profit-oriented firms, families, trade unions, hospitals, universities, schools, charities, debating clubs, non-governmental organisations, neighbourhoods, churches, and religious associations.[134]

All legal systems deal with the same basic issues, but jurisdictions categorise and identify its legal subjects in different ways. A common distinction is that between "public law" (a term related closely to the state, and including constitutional, administrative and criminal law), and "private law" (which covers contract, tort and property).[135] In civil law systems, contract and tort fall under a general law of obligations, while trusts law is dealt with under statutory regimes or international conventions. International, constitutional and administrative law, criminal law, contract, tort, property law and trusts are regarded as the "traditional core subjects",[136] although there are many further disciplines.

Conflict of laws (or "private international law" in civil law countries) concerns which jurisdiction a legal dispute between private parties should be heard in and which jurisdiction's law should be applied. Today, businesses are increasingly capable of shifting capital and labour supply chains across borders, as well as trading with overseas businesses, making the question of which country has jurisdiction even more pressing. Increasing numbers of businesses opt for commercial arbitration under the New York Convention 1958.[141]

Constitutional and administrative law govern the affairs of the state. Constitutional law concerns both the relationships between the executive, legislature and judiciary and the human rights or civil liberties of individuals against the state. Most jurisdictions, like the United States and France, have a single codified constitution with a bill of rights. A few, like the United Kingdom, have no such document. A "constitution" is simply those laws which constitute the body politic, from statute, case law and convention. A case named Entick v Carrington[144] illustrates a constitutional principle deriving from the common law. Mr Entick's house was searched and ransacked by Sheriff Carrington. When Mr Entick complained in court, Sheriff Carrington argued that a warrant from a Government minister, the Earl of Halifax, was valid authority. However, there was no written statutory provision or court authority, the leading judge, Lord Camden, stated that,

The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property, that right is preserved sacred and incommunicable in all instances, where it has not been taken away or abridged by some public law for the good of the whole … If no excuse can be found or produced, the silence of the books is an authority against the defendant, and the plaintiff must have judgment.[145]

The fundamental constitutional principle, inspired by John Locke, holds that the individual can do anything except that which is forbidden by law, and the state may do nothing except that which is authorised by law.[146][147] Administrative law is the chief method for people to hold state bodies to account. People can sue an agency, local council, public service, or government ministry for judicial review of actions or decisions, to ensure that they comply with the law, and that the government entity observed required procedure, the first specialist administrative court was the Conseil d'État set up in 1799, as Napoleon assumed power in France.[148]

Criminal law, also known as penal law, pertains to crimes and punishment,[149] it thus regulates the definition of and penalties for offences found to have a sufficiently deleterious social impact but, in itself, makes no moral judgment on an offender nor imposes restrictions on society that physically prevent people from committing a crime in the first place.[150] Investigating, apprehending, charging, and trying suspected offenders is regulated by the law of criminal procedure,[151] the paradigm case of a crime lies in the proof, beyond reasonable doubt, that a person is guilty of two things. First, the accused must commit an act which is deemed by society to be criminal, or actus reus (guilty act).[152] Second, the accused must have the requisite malicious intent to do a criminal act, or mens rea (guilty mind). However, for so called "strict liability" crimes, an actus reus is enough.[153] Criminal systems of the civil law tradition distinguish between intention in the broad sense (dolus directus and dolus eventualis), and negligence. Negligence does not carry criminal responsibility unless a particular crime provides for its punishment.[154][155]

Examples of crimes include murder, assault, fraud and theft; in exceptional circumstances defences can apply to specific acts, such as killing in self defence, or pleading insanity. Another example is in the 19th-century English case of R v Dudley and Stephens, which tested a defence of "necessity", the Mignonette, sailing from Southampton to Sydney, sank. Three crew members and Richard Parker, a 17-year-old cabin boy, were stranded on a raft, they were starving and the cabin boy was close to death. Driven to extreme hunger, the crew killed and ate the cabin boy, the crew survived and were rescued, but put on trial for murder. They argued it was necessary to kill the cabin boy to preserve their own lives. Lord Coleridge, expressing immense disapproval, ruled, "to preserve one's life is generally speaking a duty, but it may be the plainest and the highest duty to sacrifice it." The men were sentenced to hang, but public opinion was overwhelmingly supportive of the crew's right to preserve their own lives. In the end, the Crown commuted their sentences to six months in jail.[156]

Criminal law offences are viewed as offences against not just individual victims, but the community as well,[150] the state, usually with the help of police, takes the lead in prosecution, which is why in common law countries cases are cited as "The People v ..." or "R (for Rex or Regina) v ...". Also, lay juries are often used to determine the guilt of defendants on points of fact: juries cannot change legal rules, some developed countries still condone capital punishment for criminal activity, but the normal punishment for a crime will be imprisonment, fines, state supervision (such as probation), or community service. Modern criminal law has been affected considerably by the social sciences, especially with respect to sentencing, legal research, legislation, and rehabilitation,[157] on the international field, 111 countries are members of the International Criminal Court, which was established to try people for crimes against humanity.[158]

Contract law concerns enforceable promises, and can be summed up in the Latin phrase pacta sunt servanda (agreements must be kept);[159] in common law jurisdictions, three key elements to the creation of a contract are necessary: offer and acceptance, consideration and the intention to create legal relations. In Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company a medical firm advertised that its new wonder drug, the smokeball, would cure people's flu, and if it did not, the buyers would get £100. Many people sued for their £100 when the drug did not work. Fearing bankruptcy, Carbolic argued the advert was not to be taken as a serious, legally binding offer, it was an invitation to treat, mere puffery, a gimmick. But the Court of Appeal held that to a reasonable man Carbolic had made a serious offer, accentuated by their reassuring statement, "£1000 is deposited". Equally, people had given good consideration for the offer by going to the "distinct inconvenience" of using a faulty product. "Read the advertisement how you will, and twist it about as you will", said Lord Justice Lindley, "here is a distinct promise expressed in language which is perfectly unmistakable".[160]

"Consideration" indicates the fact that all parties to a contract have exchanged something of value. Some common law systems, including Australia, are moving away from the idea of consideration as a requirement, the idea of estoppel or culpa in contrahendo, can be used to create obligations during pre-contractual negotiations.[161] In civil law jurisdictions, consideration is not required for a contract to be binding;[162] in France, an ordinary contract is said to form simply on the basis of a "meeting of the minds" or a "concurrence of wills". Germany has a special approach to contracts, which ties into property law. Their 'abstraction principle' (Abstraktionsprinzip) means that the personal obligation of contract forms separately from the title of property being conferred. When contracts are invalidated for some reason (e.g. a car buyer is so drunk that he lacks legal capacity to contract)[163] the contractual obligation to pay can be invalidated separately from the proprietary title of the car. Unjust enrichment law, rather than contract law, is then used to restore title to the rightful owner.[164]

The "McLibel case" two were involved in the longest-running case in UK history for publishing a pamphlet criticising McDonald's restaurants.

Torts, sometimes called delicts, are civil wrongs. To have acted tortiously, one must have breached a duty to another person, or infringed some pre-existing legal right. A simple example might be accidentally hitting someone with a cricket ball.[165] Under the law of negligence, the most common form of tort, the injured party could potentially claim compensation for their injuries from the party responsible, the principles of negligence are illustrated by Donoghue v Stevenson.[166] A friend of Mrs Donoghue ordered an opaque bottle of ginger beer (intended for the consumption of Mrs Donoghue) in a café in Paisley. Having consumed half of it, Mrs Donoghue poured the remainder into a tumbler, the decomposing remains of a snail floated out. She claimed to have suffered from shock, fell ill with gastroenteritis and sued the manufacturer for carelessly allowing the drink to be contaminated, the House of Lords decided that the manufacturer was liable for Mrs Donoghue's illness. Lord Atkin took a distinctly moral approach, and said,

The liability for negligence … is no doubt based upon a general public sentiment of moral wrongdoing for which the offender must pay … The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law, you must not injure your neighbour; and the lawyer's question, Who is my neighbour? receives a restricted reply. You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour.[167]

This became the basis for the four principles of negligence: (1) Mr Stevenson owed Mrs Donoghue a duty of care to provide safe drinks (2) he breached his duty of care (3) the harm would not have occurred but for his breach and (4) his act was the proximate cause of her harm.[166] Another example of tort might be a neighbour making excessively loud noises with machinery on his property.[57] Under a nuisance claim the noise could be stopped. Torts can also involve intentional acts, such as assault, battery or trespass. A better known tort is defamation, which occurs, for example, when a newspaper makes unsupportable allegations that damage a politician's reputation.[168] More infamous are economic torts, which form the basis of labour law in some countries by making trade unions liable for strikes,[169] when statute does not provide immunity.[170]

A painting of the South Sea Bubble, one of the world's first ever speculations and crashes, led to strict regulation on share trading.[171]

Property law governs ownership and possession. Real property, sometimes called 'real estate', refers to ownership of land and things attached to it.[172]Personal property, refers to everything else; movable objects, such as computers, cars, jewelry or intangible rights, such as stocks and shares. A right in rem is a right to a specific piece of property, contrasting to a right in personam which allows compensation for a loss, but not a particular thing back. Land law forms the basis for most kinds of property law, and is the most complex, it concerns mortgages, rental agreements, licences, covenants, easements and the statutory systems for land registration. Regulations on the use of personal property fall under intellectual property, company law, trusts and commercial law. An example of a basic case of most property law is Armory v Delamirie [1722].[173] A chimney sweep's boy found a jewel encrusted with precious stones, he took it to a goldsmith to have it valued. The goldsmith's apprentice looked at it, sneakily removed the stones, told the boy it was worth three halfpence and that he would buy it, the boy said he would prefer the jewel back, so the apprentice gave it to him, but without the stones. The boy sued the goldsmith for his apprentice's attempt to cheat him. Lord Chief Justice Pratt ruled that even though the boy could not be said to own the jewel, he should be considered the rightful keeper ("finders keepers") until the original owner is found. In fact the apprentice and the boy both had a right of possession in the jewel (a technical concept, meaning evidence that something could belong to someone), but the boy's possessory interest was considered better, because it could be shown to be first in time. Possession may be nine tenths of the law, but not all.

This case is used to support the view of property in common law jurisdictions, that the person who can show the best claim to a piece of property, against any contesting party, is the owner.[174] By contrast, the classic civil law approach to property, propounded by Friedrich Carl von Savigny, is that it is a right good against the world. Obligations, like contracts and torts, are conceptualised as rights good between individuals,[175] the idea of property raises many further philosophical and political issues. Locke argued that our "lives, liberties and estates" are our property because we own our bodies and mix our labour with our surroundings.[176]

Equity is a body of rules that developed in England separately from the "common law", the common law was administered by judges and barristers. The Lord Chancellor on the other hand, as the King's keeper of conscience, could overrule the judge-made law if he thought it equitable to do so,[177] this meant equity came to operate more through principles than rigid rules. For instance, whereas neither the common law nor civil law systems allow people to split the ownership from the control of one piece of property, equity allows this through an arrangement known as a 'trust'. 'Trustees' control property, whereas the 'beneficial' (or 'equitable') ownership of trust property is held by people known as 'beneficiaries'. Trustees owe duties to their beneficiaries to take good care of the entrusted property;[178] in the early case of Keech v Sandford [1722][179] a child had inherited the lease on a market in Romford, London. Mr Sandford was entrusted to look after this property until the child matured, but before then, the lease expired. The landlord had (apparently) told Mr Sandford that he did not want the child to have the renewed lease. Yet the landlord was happy (apparently) to give Mr Sandford the opportunity of the lease instead. Mr Sandford took it. When the child (now Mr Keech) grew up, he sued Mr Sandford for the profit that he had been making by getting the market's lease. Mr Sandford was meant to be trusted, but he put himself in a position of conflict of interest, the Lord Chancellor, Lord King, agreed and ordered Mr Sandford should disgorge his profits. He wrote,

I very well see, if a trustee, on the refusal to renew, might have a lease to himself few trust-estates would be renewed … This may seem very hard, that the trustee is the only person of all mankind who might not have the lease; but it is very proper that the rule should be strictly pursued and not at all relaxed.

Of course, Lord King LC was worried that trustees might exploit opportunities to use trust property for themselves instead of looking after it. Business speculators using trusts had just recently caused a stock market crash. Strict duties for trustees made their way into company law and were applied to directors and chief executive officers. Another example of a trustee's duty might be to invest property wisely or sell it,[180] this is especially the case for pension funds, the most important form of trust, where investors are trustees for people's savings until retirement. But trusts can also be set up for charitable purposes, famous examples being the British Museum or the Rockefeller Foundation.

Admiralty law and the Law of the Sea lay a basic framework for free trade and commerce across the world's oceans and seas, where outside of a country's zone of control. Shipping companies operate through ordinary principles of commercial law, generalised for a global market. Admiralty law also encompasses specialised issues such as salvage, maritime liens, and injuries to passengers.

Intellectual property law aims at safeguarding creators and other producers of intellectual goods and services. These are legal rights (copyrights, trademarks, patents, and related rights) which result from intellectual activity in the industrial, literary and artistic fields.[183]

Unjust enrichment When someone has been unjustly enriched (or there is an "absence of basis" for a transaction) at another's expense, this event generates the right to restitution to reverse that gain.

Space law is a relatively new field dealing with aspects of international law regarding human activities in Earth orbit and outer space. While at first addressing space relations of countries via treaties, increasingly it is addressing areas such as space commercialisation, property, liability, and other issues.

Regulation deals with the provision of public services and utilities. Water law is one example. Especially since privatisation became popular and took management of services away from public law, private companies doing the jobs previously controlled by government have been bound by varying degrees of social responsibility. Energy, gas, telecomms and water are regulated industries in most OECD countries.

^Williams, Glanville. International Law and the Controversy Concerning the Meaning of the Word "Law". Revised version published in Laslett (Editor), Philosophy, Politics and Society (1956) p. 134 et seq. The original was published in (1945) 22 BYBIL 146.

^As a legal system, Roman law has affected the development of law worldwide. It also forms the basis for the law codes of most countries of continental Europe and has played an important role in the creation of the idea of a common European culture (Stein, Roman Law in European History, 2, 104–107).

^According to Malloy (Law and Economics, 114), Smith established "a classical liberal philosophy that made individuals the key referential sign while acknowledging that we live not alone but in community with others".

^Modern scholars argue that the significance of this distinction has progressively declined; the numerous legal transplants, typical of modern law, result in the sharing by modern legal systems of many features traditionally considered typical of either common law or civil law (Mattei, Comparative Law and Economics, 71)

^Civil law jurisdictions recognise custom as "the other source of law"; hence, scholars tend to divide the civil law into the broad categories of "written law" (ius scriptum) or legislation, and "unwritten law" (ius non scriptum) or custom. Yet they tend to dismiss custom as being of slight importance compared to legislation (Georgiadis, General Principles of Civil Law, 19; Washofsky, Taking Precedent Seriously, 7).

^Pollock (ed) Table Talk of John Selden (1927) 43; "Equity is a roguish thing. For law we have a measure... equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is longer or narrower, so is equity. 'Tis all one as if they should make the standard for the measure a Chancellor's foot."

^There is no clear legal definition of the civil society, and of the institutions it includes. Most of the institutions and bodies who try to give a list of institutions (such as the European Economic and Social Committee) exclude the political parties. For further information, see Jakobs, Pursuing Equal Opportunities, 5–6; Kaldor–Anheier–Glasius, Global Civil Society, passim (PDF); Karkatsoulis, The State in Transition, 282–283. Archived 17 August 2007 at the Wayback Machine.

^Although many scholars argue that "the boundaries between public and private law are becoming blurred", and that this distinction has become mere "folklore" (Bergkamp, Liability and Environment, 1–2).

^E.g. in England these seven subjects, with EU law substituted for international law, make up a "qualifying law degree". For criticism, see Peter Birks' poignant comments attached to a previous version of the Notice to Law Schools.

^Pagden, Anthony (1991). Vitoria: Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought). UK: Cambridge University Press. p. xvi. ISBN0-521-36714-X.

^The prevailing manner of enforcing international law is still essentially "self help"; that is the reaction by states to alleged breaches of international obligations by other states (Robertson, Crimes against Humanity, 90; Schermers-Blokker, International Institutional Law, 900–901).

Akhlaghi, Behrooz (2005). "Iranian Commercial Law and the New Investment Law FIPPA". In Yassari, Nadjma. The Sharīʻa in the Constitutions of Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt. Mohr Siebeck. ISBN3-16-148787-7.

Barzilai, Gad (2003), Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities. The University of Michigan Press, 2003. Second print 2005 ISBN0-472-11315-1

Auby, Jean-Bernard (2002). "Administrative Law in France". In Stroink, F.A.M.; Seerden, René. Administrative Law of the European Union, its Member States and the United States. Intersentia. ISBN90-5095-251-8.

Gad Barzilai (2003). Communities and Law: Politics and Cultures of Legal Identities. The University of Michigan Press. ISBN0-472-11315-1.

Curtin, Deirdre; Wessel, Ramses A. (2005). "A Survey of the Content of Good Governance for some International Organisations". Good Governance and the European Union: Reflections on Concepts, Institutions and Substance. Intersentia nv. ISBN90-5095-381-6.

Albert Venn, Dicey (2005). "Parliamentary Sovereignty and Federalism". Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN1-4021-8555-3.

Findlay, Marc (1999). "'Independence' and the Judiciary in the PRC". In Jayasuriya, Kanishka. Law, Capitalism and Power in Asia. Routledge. ISBN0-415-19742-2.

Fine, Tony F. (2001). "The Globalization of Legal Education in the United States". In Drolshammer, Jens I.; Pfeifer, Michael. The Internationalization of the Practice of Law. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ISBN90-411-1620-6.

Finn, John E. (1991). "Constitutional Dissolution in the Weimar Republic". Constitutions in Crisis: Political Violence and the Rule of Law. Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-505738-4.

Luban, David (2001). "Law's Blindfold". Conflict of Interest in the Professions. Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-512863-X.

Malloy, Robin Paul (1994). "Adam Smith and the Modern Discourse of Law and Economics". In Paul Malloy, Robin; Evensky, Jerry. Adam Smith and the Philosophy of Law and Economics. Springer. ISBN0-7923-2796-9.

Mattei, Ugo (1997). "The Distinction between Common Law and Civil Law". Comparative Law and Economics. University of Michigan Press. ISBN0-472-06649-8.

Sherif, Adel Omar (2005). "Constitutions of Arab Countries and the Position of Sharia". In Yassari, Nadjma. The Sharīʻa in the Constitutions of Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt. Mohr Siebeck. ISBN3-16-148787-7.

Weber, Max (1978). "Bureaucracy and Political Leadership". Economy and Society, Volume I (Translated and edited by Claus Wittich, Ephraim Fischoff, and Guenther Roth). University of California Press. ISBN0-520-03500-3.

Weber, Max (1964). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Edited with Introduction by Talcott Parsons – Translated in English by A. M. Henderson). The Free Press of Glencoe. ASIN B-000-LRHAX-2.

1.
Jurisprudence
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Jurisprudence is the study and theory of law. It includes principles behind law that make the law, scholars of jurisprudence, also known as jurists or legal theorists, hope to obtain a deeper understanding of the nature of law, of legal reasoning, legal systems, and of legal institutions. Modern jurisprudence began in the 18th century and was focused on the first principles of the law, civil law. Contemporary philosophy of law, which deals with general jurisprudence, addresses problems in two groups, Problems internal to law and legal systems. Problems of law as a social institution as law relates to the larger political and social situation in which it exists. Answers to these questions come from four schools of thought in general jurisprudence. The foundations of law are accessible through reason and it is from these laws of nature that human-created laws gain whatever force they have. Legal positivism, by contrast to natural law, holds that there is no connection between law and morality and that the force of law comes from some basic social facts. Legal positivists differ on what facts are. Critical legal studies are a younger theory of jurisprudence that has developed since the 1970s and it holds that the law is largely contradictory, and can be best analyzed as an expression of the policy goals of a dominant social group. A further relatively new field is known as jurisprudence, concerned with the impact of legal processes on wellbeing. The English word is based on the Latin maxim jurisprudentia, juris is the form of jus meaning law. The word is first attested in English in 1628, at a time when the word prudence had the meaning of knowledge of or skill in a matter, the word may have come via the French jurisprudence, which is attested earlier. Ancient Indian jurisprudence is available in various Dharmaśāstra texts starting from the Dharmasutra of Bhodhayana. Jurisprudence already had this meaning in Ancient Rome even if at its origins the discipline was a in the jus of mos maiorum, an iudex then would judge a remedy according to the facts of the case. The law was implemented with new evolutive Institutiones, while remaining in the traditional scheme. Praetors were replaced in the 3rd century BC by a body of prudentes. Admission to this body was conditional upon proof of competence or experience, under the Roman Empire, schools of law were created, and the activity constantly became more academic

2.
Lady Justice
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Lady Justice is an allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems. Her attributes are a blindfold, a balance, and a sword and she often appears as a pair with Prudentia, who holds a mirror and a snake. Lady Justice is also known as Iustitia or Justitia after Latin, Iustitia, the Roman goddess of Justice, the personification of justice balancing the scales dates back to the Goddess Maat, and later Isis, of ancient Egypt. The Hellenic deities Themis and Dike were later goddesses of justice, Themis was the embodiment of divine order, law, and custom, in her aspect as the personification of the divine rightness of law. There are three features of Lady Justice, a set of scales, a blindfold, and a sword. Lady Justice is most often depicted with a set of scales typically suspended from her hand, upon which she measures the strengths of a cases support. The depiction dates back to ancient Egypt, where the God Anubis was frequently depicted with a set of scales on which He weighed a deceaseds heart against the Feather of Truth, since the 16th century, Lady Justice has often been depicted wearing a blindfold. The blindfold represents impartiality, the ideal that justice should be applied without regard to wealth, the earliest Roman coins depicted Justitia with the sword in one hand and the scale in the other, but with her eyes uncovered. Justitia was only represented as blind since about the end of the 15th century. The first known representation of blind Justice is Hans Giengs 1543 statue on the Gerechtigkeitsbrunnen in Berne, instead of using the Janus approach, many sculptures simply leave out the blindfold altogether. Another variation is to depict a blindfolded Lady Justice as a human scale, an example of this can be seen at the Shelby County Courthouse in Memphis, Tennessee. The cover of a 2006 issue of Rolling Stone proclaimed TIME TO GO. focusing on the corruption that dominated Congress. The drawing showed a bunch of figures evoking reactionary politics emerging from the Capitol, one of the figures was Lady Justice lifting her blindfold, implying that the then-composition of Congress had politicized the criminal justice system. The last distinctive feature of Lady Justice is her sword, the sword represented authority in ancient times, and conveys the idea that justice can be swift and final. The Greco-Roman garment symbolizes the status of the attitude that embodies justice. Justice in sculpture Justice in painting Lady Justice and her symbols are used in heraldry, especially in the arms of legal government agencies. com

3.
Goddess
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A goddess is a female deity in polytheistic religions. Goddesses most often have characteristics that are apotheosize in their pure form. However, in some cases goddesses may embody neutral forms personifying both male and female characteristics, or they may even exhibit traits that are associated with the male gender. In some faiths, a female figure holds a central place in religious prayer. For example, Shaktism, the worship of the force that animates the world, is one of the three major sects of Hinduism. Polytheist religions, including Polytheistic reconstructionists, honour multiple goddesses and gods and these deities may be part of a pantheon, or different regions may have tutelary deities. The reconstructionists, like their ancient forebears, honour the deities particular to their country of origin, the noun goddess is a secondary formation, combining the Germanic god with the Latinate -ess suffix. It first appeared in Middle English, from about 1350, the English word follows the linguistic precedent of a number of languages—including Egyptian, Classical Greek, and several Semitic languages—that add a feminine ending to the languages word for god. Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth, a 1988 interview with Bill Moyers, links the image of the Earth or Mother Goddess to symbols of fertility and reproduction. For example, Campbell states that, There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, and in Egypt you have the Mother Heavens, the Goddess Nut, who is represented as the whole heavenly sphere. Joseph Campbell, Well that was associated primarily with agriculture and the agricultural societies and it has to do with the earth. The human woman gives birth just as the earth gives birth to the plants. so woman magic, and the personification of the energy that gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. It is in the world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Egyptian Nile. Campbell also argues that the image of the Virgin Mary was derived from the image of Isis and her child Horus, other Mesopotamian goddesses include Ninhursag, Ninlil, Antu, Gaga Goddesses of the Canaanite religion, Baalat Gebal, Astarte, Anat. Cybele, Her Hittite name was Kubaba, but her name changed to Cybele in Phrygian and Roman culture and her effect can be also seen on Artemis as the Lady of Ephesus. Hebat, Mother Goddess of the Hittite pantheon and wife of the sky god. She was the origin of the Hurrian cult, arinniti, Hittite Goddess of the sun. She became patron of the Hittite Empire and monarchy, leto, A mother Goddess figure in Lykia

4.
Justice
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Justice is the legal or philosophical theory by which fairness is administered. The concept of justice differs in every culture, an early theory of justice was set out by the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato in his work The Republic. Advocates of divine command theory argue that justice issues from God, in the 17th century, theorists like John Locke argued for the theory of natural law. Thinkers in the social contract tradition argued that justice is derived from the agreement of everyone concerned. In the 19th century, utilitarian thinkers including John Stuart Mill argued that justice is what has the best consequences, Theories of distributive justice concern what is distributed, between whom they are to be distributed, and what is the proper distribution. Egalitarians argued that justice can only exist within the coordinates of equality, John Rawls used a social contract argument to show that justice, and especially distributive justice, is a form of fairness. Property rights theorists take a view of distributive justice and argue that property rights-based justice maximizes the overall wealth of an economic system. Theories of retributive justice are concerned with punishment for wrongdoing, restorative justice is an approach to justice that focuses on restoring what is good, and necessarily focuses on the needs of victims and offenders. Understandings of justice differ in culture, as cultures are usually dependent upon a shared history. Each cultures ethics create values which influence the notion of justice, although there can be found some justice principles that are one and the same in all or most of the cultures, these are insufficient to create a unitary justice apprehension. In his dialogue Republic, Plato uses Socrates to argue for justice that covers both the just person and the just City State, Justice is a proper, harmonious relationship between the warring parts of the person or city. Hence, Platos definition of justice is that justice is the having and doing of what is ones own, a just man is a man in just the right place, doing his best and giving the precise equivalent of what he has received. This applies both at the level and at the universal level. A persons soul has three parts – reason, spirit and desire, similarly, a city has three parts – Socrates uses the parable of the chariot to illustrate his point, a chariot works as a whole because the two horses power is directed by the charioteer. Lovers of wisdom – philosophers, in one sense of the term – should rule because only they understand what is good, if one is ill, one goes to a medic rather than a farmer, because the medic is expert in the subject of health. Similarly, one should trust ones city to an expert in the subject of the good, not to a politician who tries to gain power by giving people what they want. For Socrates, the way the ship will reach its destination – the good – is if the navigator takes charge. Advocates of divine command theory argue that justice, and indeed the whole of morality, is the command of God

5.
Tribunal
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A tribunal, generally, is any person or institution with authority to judge, adjudicate on, or determine claims or disputes—whether or not it is called a tribunal in its title. For example, an advocate who appears before a court with a judge could describe that judge as their tribunal. Many governmental bodies that are titled tribunals are so described to emphasize that they are not courts of normal jurisdiction, private judicial bodies are also often styled tribunals. However, he word tribunal is not conclusive of a bodys function–for example, in Great Britain, the term is derived from the tribunes, magistrates of the Classical Roman Republic. Tribunal originally referred to the office of the tribunes, and the term is sometimes used in this sense in historical writings. In the Republic of Ireland, tribunal refers to a public inquiry established under the Tribunals of Inquiry Act 1921. The main difference between a Parliamentary Inquiry and a Tribunal of Inquiry in Ireland is that non-statutory inquiries are not vested with the powers, privileges, Tribunals are established by resolution of the Houses of the Oireachtas to enquire into matters of urgent public importance. It is not a function of Tribunals to administer justice, their work is solely inquisitorial, Tribunals are obliged to report their findings to the Oireachtas. They have the power to enforce the attendance and examination of witnesses, Tribunals can consist of one or more people. A layperson, or non-lawyer, may be the Sole member of a tribunal, the tribunal system of the United Kingdom is part of the national system of administrative justice. Such a tribunal was called a Vierschaar, so called for the dimensions of the sitting judges. Most towns had the Vierschaar privilege to hear their own disputes, the Vierschaar was usually located in the town hall, and many historic town halls still have such a room, usually decorated with scenes from the Judgment of Solomon. The following tribunals exist within the Judiciary of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the Peoples Republic of China, Lands, Small Claims, Labour, for public inquiries, commissions are set up instead, under the Commissions of Inquiry Ordinance. In many cases, the rules of evidence which apply in courts do not apply in tribunals. Appeal from a tribunal is to a court, in the context of sport, tribunal frequently refers to the AFL Tribunal, the disciplinary body of the Australian Football League. Tribunal is used in the U. S. generally to refer to courts or judicial bodies, in Bangladesh, tribunal refers to a court that serves some special purpose—of which Bangladesh have several. These have been set up to ensure speedy trial and reduce congestion in the normal courts. Beside this, Article 117 of the Constitution Of The Peoples Republic of Bangladesh empowers the parliament to set up one or more administrative tribunals, no court can entertain any proceeding or make any order in respect of any matter within the jurisdiction of such tribunal

6.
Weighing scale
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Weighing scales are devices to measure weight or calculate mass. Scales and balances are used in commerce, as many products are sold. Very accurate balances, called analytical balances, are used in fields such as chemistry. Although records dating to the 1700s refer to spring scales for measuring weight, the earliest design for such a device dates to 1770 and credits Richard Salter, an early scale-maker. Postal workers could work quickly with spring scales than balance scales because they could be read instantaneously. By the 1940s various electronic devices were being attached to these designs to make more accurate. A spring scale measures weight by reporting the distance that a spring deflects under a load and this contrasts to a balance, which compares the torque on the arm due to a sample weight to the torque on the arm due to a standard reference weight using a horizontal lever. Spring scales measure force, which is the force of constraint acting on an object. They are usually calibrated so that measured force translates to mass at earths gravity, the object to be weighed can be simply hung from the spring or set on a pivot and bearing platform. In a spring scale, the spring either stretches or compresses, by Hookes law, every spring has a proportionality constant that relates how hard it is pulled to how far it stretches. Rack and pinion mechanisms are used to convert the linear spring motion to a dial reading. With proper manufacturing and setup, however, spring scales can be rated as legal for commerce, to remove the temperature error, a commerce-legal spring scale must either have temperature-compensated springs or be used at a fairly constant temperature. To eliminate the effect of gravity variations, a spring scale must be calibrated where it is used. It is also common in high-capacity applications such as crane scales to use force to sense weight. The test force is applied to a piston or diaphragm and transmitted through hydraulic lines to an indicator based on a Bourdon tube or electronic sensor. A digital bathroom scale is a type of electronic weighing machine, the digital bathroom scale is a smart scale which has many functions like smartphone integration, cloud storage, fitness tracking, etc. In electronic versions of spring scales, the deflection of a beam supporting the weight is measured using a strain gauge. The capacity of such devices is only limited by the resistance of the beam to deflection and these scales are used in the modern bakery, grocery, delicatessen, seafood, meat, produce and other perishable goods departments

7.
System
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A system is a set of interacting or interdependent component parts forming a complex or intricate whole. Every system is delineated by its spatial and temporal boundaries, surrounded and influenced by its environment, described by its structure and purpose and expressed in its functioning. Alternatively, and usually in the context of social systems. The term system comes from the Latin word systēma, in turn from Greek σύστημα systēma, whole compounded of several parts or members, system, according to Marshall McLuhan, System means something to look at. You must have a high visual gradient to have systematization. In philosophy, prior to Descartes, there was no system, in the 19th century the French physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, who studied thermodynamics, pioneered the development of the concept of a system in the natural sciences. In 1824 he studied the system which he called the substance in steam engines. The working substance could be put in contact with either a boiler, in 1850, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius generalized this picture to include the concept of the surroundings and began to use the term working body when referring to the system. The biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy became one of the pioneers of the systems theory. Norbert Wiener and Ross Ashby, who pioneered the use of mathematics to study systems, in the 1980s John H. Holland, Murray Gell-Mann and others coined the term complex adaptive system at the interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute. Environment and boundaries Systems theory views the world as a system of interconnected parts. One scopes a system by defining its boundary, this means choosing which entities are inside the system, one can make simplified representations of the system in order to understand it and to predict or impact its future behavior. These models may define the structure and behavior of the system, Natural and human-made systems There are natural and human-made systems. Natural systems may not have an apparent objective but their behavior can be interpreted as purposefull by an observer, human-made systems are made to satisfy an identified and stated need with purposes that are achieved by the delivery of wanted outputs. Their parts must be related, they must be designed to work as a coherent entity – otherwise they would be two or more distinct systems, Theoretical framework An open system exchanges matter and energy with its surroundings. Most systems are open systems, like a car, a coffeemaker, a closed system exchanges energy, but not matter, with its environment, like Earth or the project Biosphere2 or 3. An isolated system exchanges neither matter nor energy with its environment, a theoretical example of such system is the Universe. Inputs are consumed, outputs are produced, the concept of input and output here is very broad

8.
Law enforcement
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Most law enforcement is conducted by some type of law enforcement agency, with the most typical agency fulfilling this role being the police. Law enforcement agencies tend to be limited to operating within a specified jurisdiction, various specialized segments of society may have their own internal law enforcement arrangements. For example, military organizations may have military police, outline of law enforcement – structured list of topics related to law enforcement, organized by subject area Criminal law Biosecurity Commons

9.
Statute
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A statute is a formal written enactment of a legislative authority that governs a state, city or country. Typically, statutes command or prohibit something, or declare policy, statutes are rules made by legislative bodies, they are distinguished from case law or precedent, which is decided by courts, and regulations issued by government agencies. Statute law is written by a legislative body and signed into law by its executive. Before a statute becomes law in countries, it must be agreed upon by the highest executive in the government. A universal problem encountered by lawmakers throughout human history is how to organize published statutes, such publications have a habit of starting small but growing rapidly over time, as new statutes are enacted in response to the exigencies of the moment. Eventually, persons trying to find the law are forced to sort through a number of statutes enacted at various points in time to determine which portions are still in effect. In turn, in theory, the code will thenceforth reflect the current cumulative state of the law in that jurisdiction. In many nations statutory law is distinguished from and subordinate to constitutional law, statute is also another word for law. The term was adapted from England in about the 18th century, in the Autonomous Communities of Spain, the autonomy statute is a legal document similar to a state constitution in a federated state. The autonomies statutes in Spain have the rank of Ley Organica, leyes Organicas rank between the Constitution and ordinary laws. The name was chosen, among others, to avoid confusion with the term Constitution, in biblical terminology, statute refers to a law given without any reason or justification. The classic example is the statute regarding the Red Heifer. The opposite of a chok is a mishpat, a law given for a reason, e. g. the Sabbath laws, which were given because God created the world in six days. That which upholds, supports or maintains the order of the universe meaning the Law or Natural Law. This is a concept of central importance in Indian philosophy and religion, Constitution Legislation Legislature Organic statute Statutory law

10.
Common law
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Common law is the body of law developed from the thirteenth century to the present day, as case law or precedent, by judges, courts, and tribunals. In cases where the parties disagree on what the law is, if a similar dispute has been resolved in the past, the court is usually bound to follow the reasoning used in the prior decision. Resolution of the issue in one case becomes precedent that binds future courts, stare decisis, the principle that cases should be decided according to consistent principled rules so that similar facts will yield similar results, lies at the heart of all common law systems. A common law system is a system that gives great precedential weight to common law. Common law systems originated during the Middle Ages in England, today, one third of the worlds population live in common law jurisdictions or in systems mixed with civil law. The term common law has many connotations, the first three set out here are the most-common usages within the legal community. Other connotations from past centuries are seen, and are sometimes heard in everyday speech. Blacks Law Dictionary, 10th Ed. gives as definition 1,1, the body of law derived from judicial decisions, rather than from statutes or constitutions, CASELAW, STATUTORY LAW. In this connotation, common law distinguishes the authority that promulgated a law. e, examples include most criminal law and procedural law before the 20th century, and even today, most contract law and the law of torts. Interstitial common law decisions that analyze, interpret and determine the fine boundaries. Publication of decisions, and indexing, is essential to the development of common law, while all decisions in common law jurisdictions are precedent, some become leading cases or landmark decisions that are cited especially often. Blacks 10th Ed. definition 2, differentiates common law jurisdictions, by contrast, in civil law jurisdictions, courts lack authority to act if there is no statute. Judicial precedent is given less weight, which means that a judge deciding a given case has more freedom to interpret the text of a statute independently. For example, the Napoleonic code expressly forbade French judges to pronounce general principles of law. As a rule of thumb, common law systems trace their history to England, blacks 10th Ed. definition 4, differentiates common law from equity. This split propagated to many of the colonies, including the United States, for most purposes, most jurisdictions, including the U. S. federal system and most states, have merged the two courts. Additionally, even before the courts were merged, most courts were permitted to apply both law and equity, though under potentially different procedural law. In the United States, determining whether the Seventh Amendments right to a jury trial applies or whether the issue will be decided by a judge, the standard of review and degree of deference given by an appellate tribunal to the decision of the lower tribunal under review

11.
Contract
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A contract is a voluntary arrangement between two or more parties that is enforceable by law as a binding legal agreement. Contract is a branch of the law of obligations in jurisdictions of the civil law tradition, Contract law concerns the rights and duties that arise from agreements. A contract arises when the parties agree that there is an agreement, formation of a contract generally requires an offer, acceptance, consideration, and a mutual intent to be bound. Each party to a contract must have capacity to enter the agreement, minors, intoxicated persons, and those under a mental affliction may have insufficient capacity to enter a contract. Some types of contracts may require formalities, such as a memorialization in writing, at common law, the elements of a contract are offer, acceptance, intention to create legal relations, and consideration. Not all agreements are necessarily contractual, as the parties generally must be deemed to have an intention to be legally bound, a so-called gentlemens agreement is one which is not intended to be legally enforceable, and which is binding in honour only. In order for a contract to be formed, the parties must reach mutual assent and this is typically reached through offer and an acceptance which does not vary the offers terms, which is known as the mirror image rule. An offer is a statement of the offerors willingness to be bound should certain conditions be met. If a purported acceptance does vary the terms of an offer, it is not an acceptance but a counteroffer and, therefore, the Uniform Commercial Code disposes of the mirror image rule in §2-207, although the UCC only governs transactions in goods in the USA. As a court cannot read minds, the intent of the parties is interpreted objectively from the perspective of a reasonable person and it is important to note that where an offer specifies a particular mode of acceptance, only an acceptance communicated via that method will be valid. Contracts may be bilateral or unilateral, a bilateral contract is an agreement in which each of the parties to the contract makes a promise or set of promises to each other. For example, in a contract for the sale of a home, less common are unilateral contracts in which one party makes a promise, but the other side does not promise anything. In these cases, those accepting the offer are not required to communicate their acceptance to the offeror, in a reward contract, for example, a person who has lost a dog could promise a reward if the dog is found, through publication or orally. The payment could be conditioned on the dog being returned alive. Those who learn of the reward are not required to search for the dog, but if someone finds the dog and delivers it, the High Court of Australia stated that the term unilateral contract is unscientific and misleading. In certain circumstances, a contract may be created. A contract is implied in fact if the circumstances imply that parties have reached an agreement even though they have not done so expressly, quantum meruit claims are an example. Carbolic, a firm, advertised a smoke ball marketed as a wonder drug that would, according to the instructions

12.
Constitution
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A constitution is a set of fundamental principles or established precedents according to which a state or other organization is governed. These rules together make up, i. e. constitute, some constitutions are uncodified, but written in numerous fundamental Acts of a legislature, court cases or treaties. Constitutions concern different levels of organizations, from states to companies. A treaty which establishes an international organization is also its constitution, within states, a constitution defines the principles upon which the state is based, the procedure in which laws are made and by whom. Some constitutions, especially codified constitutions, also act as limiters of state power, by establishing lines which a states rulers cannot cross, the term constitution comes through French from the Latin word constitutio, used for regulations and orders, such as the imperial enactments. Later, the term was used in canon law for an important determination, especially a decree issued by the Pope. The Latin term ultra vires describes activities of officials within an organization or polity that fall outside the constitutional or statutory authority of those officials. Ultra vires gives a justification for the forced cessation of such action. A violation of rights by an official would be ultra vires because a right is a restriction on the powers of government, and therefore that official would be exercising powers they do not have. It was never law, even though, if it had been a statute or statutory provision, in such a case, only the application may be ruled unconstitutional. Historically, the remedy for such violations have been petitions for common law writs, excavations in modern-day Iraq by Ernest de Sarzec in 1877 found evidence of the earliest known code of justice, issued by the Sumerian king Urukagina of Lagash ca 2300 BC. Perhaps the earliest prototype for a law of government, this document itself has not yet been discovered, for example, it is known that it relieved tax for widows and orphans, and protected the poor from the usury of the rich. After that, many governments ruled by codes of written laws. The oldest such document still known to exist seems to be the Code of Ur-Nammu of Ur, some of the better-known ancient law codes include the code of Lipit-Ishtar of Isin, the code of Hammurabi of Babylonia, the Hittite code, the Assyrian code and Mosaic law. In 621 BC a scribe named Draco codified the cruel oral laws of the city-state of Athens, in 594 BC Solon, the ruler of Athens, created the new Solonian Constitution. It eased the burden of the workers, and determined that membership of the class was to be based on wealth. Cleisthenes again reformed the Athenian constitution and set it on a footing in 508 BC. The most basic definition he used to describe a constitution in general terms was the arrangement of the offices in a state

13.
Rights
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Rights are of essential importance in such disciplines as law and ethics, especially theories of justice and deontology. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, rights structure the form of governments, the content of laws, there is considerable disagreement about what is meant precisely by the term rights. One way to get an idea of the understandings and senses of the term is to consider different ways it is used. Natural rights are rights which are natural in the sense of not artificial, not man-made, as in rights deriving from deontic logic, from human nature, or from the edicts of a god. They are universal, that is, they apply to all people and they exist necessarily, inhere in every individual, and cant be taken away. For example, it has argued that humans have a natural right to life. These are sometimes called moral rights or inalienable rights, legal rights, in contrast, are based on a societys customs, laws, statutes or actions by legislatures. An example of a right is the right to vote of citizens. Citizenship, itself, is considered as the basis for having legal rights. Legal rights are called civil rights or statutory rights and are culturally and politically relative since they depend on a specific societal context to have meaning. Some thinkers see rights in one sense while others accept that both senses have a measure of validity. There has been considerable debate about these senses throughout history. A claim right is a right which entails that another person has a duty to the right-holder. In logic, this idea can be expressed as, Person A has a claim that person B do something if, every claim-right entails that some other duty-bearer must do some duty for the claim to be satisfied. This duty can be to act or to refrain from acting, likewise, in jurisdictions where social welfare services are provided, citizens have legal claim rights to be provided with those services. A liberty right or privilege, in contrast, is simply a freedom or permission for the right-holder to do something and this can be expressed in logic as, Person A has a privilege to do something if and only if A has no duty not to do that something. Likewise, if a person has a right against someone else. For example, a person has a liberty right to walk down a sidewalk and can decide whether or not to do so

14.
Politics
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Politics is the process of making decisions applying to all members of each group. More narrowly, it refers to achieving and exercising positions of governance — organized control over a human community, furthermore, politics is the study or practice of the distribution of power and resources within a given community as well as the interrelationship between communities. It is very often said that politics is about power, a political system is a framework which defines acceptable political methods within a given society. History of political thought can be traced back to antiquity, with seminal works such as Platos Republic, Aristotles Politics. Formal Politics refers to the operation of a system of government and publicly defined institutions. Political parties, public policy or discussions about war and foreign affairs would fall under the category of Formal Politics, many people view formal politics as something outside of themselves, but that can still affect their daily lives. Semi-formal Politics is Politics in government associations such as neighborhood associations, informal Politics is understood as forming alliances, exercising power and protecting and advancing particular ideas or goals. Generally, this includes anything affecting ones daily life, such as the way an office or household is managed, informal Politics is typically understood as everyday politics, hence the idea that politics is everywhere. The word comes from the same Greek word from which the title of Aristotles book Politics also derives, the book title was rendered in Early Modern English in the mid-15th century as Polettiques, it became politics in Modern English. The history of politics is reflected in the origin, development, the origin of the state is to be found in the development of the art of warfare. Historically speaking, all communities of the modern type owe their existence to successful warfare. Kings, emperors and other types of monarchs in many countries including China, of the institutions that ruled states, that of kingship stood at the forefront until the French Revolution put an end to the divine right of kings. Nevertheless, the monarchy is among the political institutions, dating as early as 2100 BC in Sumeria to the 21st century AD British Monarchy. Kingship becomes an institution through the institution of Hereditary monarchy, the king often, even in absolute monarchies, ruled his kingdom with the aid of an elite group of advisors, a council without which he could not maintain power. As these advisors and others outside the monarchy negotiated for power, constitutional monarchies emerged, long before the council became a bulwark of democracy, it rendered invaluable aid to the institution of kingship by, Preserving the institution of kingship through heredity. Preserving the traditions of the social order, being able to withstand criticism as an impersonal authority. Being able to manage a greater deal of knowledge and action than an individual such as the king. The greatest of the subordinates, the earls and dukes in England and Scotland

15.
Economics
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Economics is a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work, consistent with this focus, textbooks often distinguish between microeconomics and macroeconomics. Microeconomics examines the behaviour of elements in the economy, including individual agents and markets, their interactions. Individual agents may include, for example, households, firms, buyers, macroeconomics analyzes the entire economy and issues affecting it, including unemployment of resources, inflation, economic growth, and the public policies that address these issues. Economic analysis can be applied throughout society, as in business, finance, health care, Economic analyses may also be applied to such diverse subjects as crime, education, the family, law, politics, religion, social institutions, war, science, and the environment. At the turn of the 21st century, the domain of economics in the social sciences has been described as economic imperialism. The ultimate goal of economics is to improve the conditions of people in their everyday life. There are a variety of definitions of economics. Some of the differences may reflect evolving views of the subject or different views among economists, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue for the publick services. Say, distinguishing the subject from its uses, defines it as the science of production, distribution. On the satirical side, Thomas Carlyle coined the dismal science as an epithet for classical economics, in this context and it enquires how he gets his income and how he uses it. Thus, it is on the one side, the study of wealth and on the other and more important side, a part of the study of man. He affirmed that previous economists have usually centred their studies on the analysis of wealth, how wealth is created, distributed, and consumed, but he said that economics can be used to study other things, such as war, that are outside its usual focus. This is because war has as the goal winning it, generates both cost and benefits, and, resources are used to attain the goal. If the war is not winnable or if the costs outweigh the benefits. Some subsequent comments criticized the definition as overly broad in failing to limit its subject matter to analysis of markets, there are other criticisms as well, such as in scarcity not accounting for the macroeconomics of high unemployment. The same source reviews a range of included in principles of economics textbooks. Among economists more generally, it argues that a particular definition presented may reflect the direction toward which the author believes economics is evolving, microeconomics examines how entities, forming a market structure, interact within a market to create a market system

16.
History
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History is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered prehistory and it is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of information about these events. Scholars who write about history are called historians and their works continue to be read today, and the gap between the culture-focused Herodotus and the military-focused Thucydides remains a point of contention or approach in modern historical writing. In Asia, a chronicle, the Spring and Autumn Annals was known to be compiled from as early as 722 BC although only 2nd-century BC texts survived. Ancient influences have helped spawn variant interpretations of the nature of history which have evolved over the centuries, the modern study of history is wide-ranging, and includes the study of specific regions and the study of certain topical or thematical elements of historical investigation. Often history is taught as part of primary and secondary education, the word history comes ultimately from Ancient Greek ἱστορία, meaning inquiry, knowledge from inquiry, or judge. It was in that sense that Aristotle used the word in his Περὶ Τὰ Ζῷα Ἱστορίαι, the ancestor word ἵστωρ is attested early on in Homeric Hymns, Heraclitus, the Athenian ephebes oath, and in Boiotic inscriptions. History was borrowed from Latin into Old English as stær, and it was from Anglo-Norman that history was borrowed into Middle English, and this time the loan stuck. In Middle English, the meaning of history was story in general, the restriction to the meaning the branch of knowledge that deals with past events, the formal record or study of past events, esp. human affairs arose in the mid-fifteenth century. With the Renaissance, older senses of the word were revived, and it was in the Greek sense that Francis Bacon used the term in the sixteenth century. For him, historia was the knowledge of objects determined by space and time, in an expression of the linguistic synthetic vs. analytic/isolating dichotomy, English like Chinese now designates separate words for human history and storytelling in general. In modern German, French, and most Germanic and Romance languages, which are synthetic and highly inflected. The adjective historical is attested from 1661, and historic from 1669, Historian in the sense of a researcher of history is attested from 1531. Historians write in the context of their own time, and with due regard to the current dominant ideas of how to interpret the past, in the words of Benedetto Croce, All history is contemporary history. History is facilitated by the formation of a discourse of past through the production of narrative. The modern discipline of history is dedicated to the production of this discourse. All events that are remembered and preserved in some authentic form constitute the historical record, the task of historical discourse is to identify the sources which can most usefully contribute to the production of accurate accounts of past. Therefore, the constitution of the archive is a result of circumscribing a more general archive by invalidating the usage of certain texts and documents

17.
Society
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In the social sciences, a larger society often evinces stratification or dominance patterns in subgroups. A society can also consist of like-minded people governed by their own norms and values within a dominant and this is sometimes referred to as a subculture, a term used extensively within criminology. The term society came from the Latin word societas, which in turn was derived from the noun used to describe a bond or interaction between parties that are friendly, or at least civil. Without an article, the term can refer to the entirety of humanity, Society, in general, addresses the fact that an individual has rather limited means as an autonomous unit. Cultural relativism as an approach or ethic has largely replaced notions of primitive, better/worse. Societies may also be structured politically, in order of increasing size and complexity, there are bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and state societies. These structures may have varying degrees of power, depending on the cultural, geographical. Thus, an isolated society with the same level of technology. A society that is unable to offer a response to other societies it competes with will usually be subsumed into the culture of the competing society. Sociologist Peter L. Berger defines society as. a human product, and nothing but a human product, according to him, society was created by humans but this creation turns back and creates or molds humans every day. This is similar to the earlier developed by anthropologists Morton H. This system of classification contains four categories, Hunter-gatherer bands, tribal societies in which there are some limited instances of social rank and prestige. Civilizations, with complex social hierarchies and organized, institutional governments, in addition to this there are, Humanity, mankind, upon which rest all the elements of society, including societys beliefs. Virtual society, a society based on identity, which is evolving in the information age. Over time, some cultures have progressed toward more complex forms of organization and this cultural evolution has a profound effect on patterns of community. Hunter-gatherer tribes settled around seasonal food stocks to become agrarian villages, villages grew to become towns and cities. Cities turned into city-states and nation-states, many societies distribute largess at the behest of some individual or some larger group of people. This type of generosity can be seen in all cultures, typically

18.
Civil law (legal system)
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Conceptually, civil law proceeds from abstractions, formulates general principles, and distinguishes substantive rules from procedural rules. It holds case law to be secondary and subordinate to statutory law, when discussing civil law, one should keep in mind the conceptual difference between a statute and a codal article. The marked feature of civilian systems is that they use codes with brief text that tend to avoid factually specific scenarios, Code articles deal in generalities and thus stand at odds with statutory schemes which are often very long and very detailed. The purpose of codification is to all citizens with manners and written collection of the laws which apply to them. Law codes are simply laws enacted by a legislature, even if they are in much longer than other laws. Other major legal systems in the world include common law, Halakha, canon law, the Scandinavian systems are of a hybrid character since their background law is a mix of civil law and Scandinavian customary law and have been partially codified. Likewise, the laws of the Channel Islands are hybrids which mix Norman customary law, a prominent example of a civil-law code would be the Napoleonic Code, named after French emperor Napoleon. The Code comprises three components, the law of persons, property law, and commercial law, rather than a compendium of statutes or catalog of caselaw, the Code sets out general principles as rules of law. Unlike common law systems, civil law jurisdictions deal with case law apart from any precedent value, Civil law courts generally decide cases using codal provisions on a case-by-case basis, without reference to other judicial decisions. In actual practice, a degree of precedent is creeping into civil law jurisprudence. A line of similar case decisions, while not precedent per se, while civil law jurisdictions place little reliance on court decisions, they tend to generate a phenomenal number of reported legal opinions. However, this tends to be uncontrolled, since there is no requirement that any case be reported or published in a law report, except for the councils of state. Except for the highest courts, all publication of legal opinions are unofficial or commercial, Civil law is sometimes referred to as neo-Roman law, Romano-Germanic law or Continental law. The civil law takes as its major inspiration classical Roman law, and in particular Justinian law, the Justinian Codes doctrines provided a sophisticated model for contracts, rules of procedure, family law, wills, and a strong monarchical constitutional system. Roman law was received differently in different countries, in some it went into force wholesale by legislative act, i. e. it became positive law, whereas in others it was diffused into society by increasingly influential legal experts and scholars. Roman law continued without interruption in the Byzantine Empire until its fall in the 15th century. However, subject as it was to multiple incursions and occupations by Western European powers in the medieval period. It was first received into the Holy Roman Empire partly because it was considered imperial law and it became the basis of Scots law, though partly rivaled by received feudal Norman law

19.
Jurisdiction
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Jurisdiction is the practical authority granted to a legal body to administer justice within a defined area of responsibility, e. g. Michigan tax law. In federations like the U. S. areas of jurisdiction apply to local, state, colloquially it is used to refer to the geographical area to which such authority applies, e. g. the court has jurisdiction over all of Colorado. The legal term refers only to the authority, not to a geographical area. International laws and treaties provide agreements which nations agree to be bound to, supranational organizations provide mechanisms whereby disputes between nations may be resolved through arbitration or mediation. When a country is recognized as de jure, it is an acknowledgment by the de jure nations that the country has sovereignty. However, it is often at the discretion of each nation whether to co-operate or participate, if a nation does agree to participate in activities of the supranational bodies and accept decisions, the nation is giving up its sovereign authority and thereby allocating power to these bodies. The fact that organizations, courts and tribunals have been created raises the difficult question of how to co-ordinate their activities with those of national courts. But, to invoke the jurisdiction in any case, all the parties have to accept the prospective judgment as binding. This reduces the risk of wasting the Courts time, each such group may form transnational institutions with declared legislative or judicial powers. For example, in Europe, the European Court of Justice has been given jurisdiction as the appellate court to the member states on issues of European law. This jurisdiction is entrenched and its authority could only be denied by a member if that member nation asserts its sovereignty. Hence, in the Netherlands, all treaties and the orders of international organizations are effective without any action being required to convert international into municipal law, in nations adopting this theory, the local courts automatically accept jurisdiction to adjudicate on lawsuits relying on international law principles. Otherwise the courts have a discretion to apply international law where it does not conflict with statute or the common law. According to the Supreme Court of the United States, the treaty power authorizes Congress to legislate under the Necessary and this concerns the relationships both between courts in different jurisdictions, and between courts within the same jurisdiction. The usual legal doctrine under which questions of jurisdiction are decided is termed forum non conveniens, to deal with the issue of forum shopping, nations are urged to adopt more positive rules on conflict of laws. In addition, the Lugano Convention binds the European Union and the European Free Trade Association, council Regulation 44/2001 now also applies as between the rest of the EU Member States and Denmark due to an agreement reached between the European Community and Denmark. In some legal areas, at least, the CACA enforcement of judgments is now more straightforward. At a national level, the rules still determine jurisdiction over persons who are not domiciled or habitually resident in the European Union or the Lugano area

20.
Sharia
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Sharia, Sharia law, or Islamic law is the religious law forming part of the Islamic tradition. It is derived from the precepts of Islam, particularly the Quran. In Arabic, the term refers to Gods divine law and is contrasted with fiqh. The manner of its application in modern times has been a subject of dispute between Muslim traditionalists and reformists, traditional theory of Islamic jurisprudence recognizes four sources of sharia, the Quran, sunnah, qiyas, and ijma. Traditional jurisprudence distinguishes two branches of law, ʿibādāt and muʿāmalāt, which together comprise a wide range of topics. Its rulings assign actions to one of five categories, mandatory, recommended, permitted, abhorred, thus, some areas of sharia overlap with the Western notion of law while others correspond more broadly to living life in accordance with God’s will. Historically, sharia was interpreted by independent jurists, ottoman rulers achieved additional control over the legal system by promulgating their own legal code and turning muftis into state employees. Non-Muslim communities had legal autonomy, except in cases of interconfessional disputes, in the modern era, sharia-based criminal laws were widely replaced by statutes inspired by European models. Judicial procedures and legal education in the Muslim world were brought in line with European practice. While the constitutions of most Muslim-majority states contain references to sharia, legislative bodies which codified these laws sought to modernize them without abandoning their foundations in traditional jurisprudence. The Islamic revival of the late 20th century brought along calls by Islamist movements for full implementation of sharia, including reinstatement of hudud corporal punishments, in some cases, this resulted in traditionalist legal reform, while other countries witnessed juridical reinterpretation of sharia advocated by progressive reformers. The role of sharia has become a contested topic around the world, attempts to impose it on non-Muslims have caused intercommunal violence in Nigeria and may have contributed to the breakup of Sudan. Some Muslim-minority countries in Asia, Africa and Europe recognize the use of sharia-based family laws for their Muslim populations, there are ongoing debates as to whether sharia is compatible with secular forms of government, human rights, freedom of thought, and womens rights. The word sharīʿah is used by Arabic-speaking peoples of the Middle East to designate a prophetic religion in its totality, for example, sharīʿat Mūsā means law or religion of Moses and sharīʿatu-nā can mean our religion in reference to any monotheistic faith. Within Islamic discourse, šarīʿah refers to regulations governing the lives of Muslims. For many Muslims, the word means simply justice, and they will consider any law that promotes justice, Muslims of different perspectives agree in their respect for the abstract notion of sharia, but they differ in how they understand the practical implications of the term. Classical sharia, the body of rules and principles elaborated by Islamic jurists during the first centuries of Islam, historical sharia, the body of rules and interpretations developed throughout Islamic history, ranging from personal beliefs to state legislation and varying across an ideological spectrum. Classical sharia has often served as a point of reference for these variants, Contemporary sharia, the full spectrum of rules and interpretations that are developed and practiced at present

21.
Criminal law
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Criminal law is the body of law that relates to crime. It regulates social conduct and proscribes whatever is threatening, harmful, or otherwise endangering to the property, health, safety and it includes the punishment of people who violate these laws. Criminal law varies according to jurisdiction, and differs from civil law, the first civilizations generally did not distinguish between civil law and criminal law. The first written codes of law were designed by the Sumerians, another important early code was the Code Hammurabi, which formed the core of Babylonian law. Only fragments of the criminal laws of Ancient Greece have survived, e. g. those of Solon. In Roman law, Gaiuss Commentaries on the Twelve Tables also conflated the civil and criminal aspects, assault and violent robbery were analogized to trespass as to property. Breach of such laws created an obligation of law or vinculum juris discharged by payment of compensation or damages. The criminal law of imperial Rome is collected in Books 47–48 of the Digest, the first signs of the modern distinction between crimes and civil matters emerged during the Norman Invasion of England. The development of the state dispensing justice in a court clearly emerged in the century when European countries began maintaining police services. From this point, criminal law had formalized the mechanisms for enforcement, Criminal law is distinctive for the uniquely serious potential consequences or sanctions for failure to abide by its rules. Every crime is composed of criminal elements, capital punishment may be imposed in some jurisdictions for the most serious crimes. Physical or corporal punishment may be imposed such as whipping or caning, individuals may be incarcerated in prison or jail in a variety of conditions depending on the jurisdiction. Length of incarceration may vary from a day to life, government supervision may be imposed, including house arrest, and convicts may be required to conform to particularized guidelines as part of a parole or probation regimen. Fines also may be imposed, seizing money or property from a convicted of a crime. Five objectives are widely accepted for enforcement of the law by punishments, retribution, deterrence. Jurisdictions differ on the value to be placed on each, retribution – Criminals ought to Be Punished in some way. This is the most widely seen goal, Criminals have taken improper advantage, or inflicted unfair detriment, upon others and consequently, the criminal law will put criminals at some unpleasant disadvantage to balance the scales. People submit to the law to receive the right not to be murdered and if people contravene these laws, thus, one who murders may be executed himself

22.
Guilt (law)
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In criminal law, guilt is the state of being responsible for the commission of an offense. Legal guilt is entirely defined by the state, or more generally a “court of law”. Being “guilty” of a criminal offense means that one has committed a violation of criminal law, the determination that one has committed that violation is made by an external body and is, therefore, as definitive as the record-keeping of the body. So the most basic definition is fundamentally circular, a person is guilty of violating a law, philosophically, guilt in criminal law is a reflection of a functioning society and its ability to condemn individuals’ actions. It rests fundamentally on a presumption of free will, in which individuals choose actions and are, therefore, “An adjudication of guilt is more than a factual determination that the defendant pulled a trigger, took a bicycle, or sold heroin. It is a judgment that the individual is blameworthy. Our collective conscience does not allow punishment where it cannot impose blame and our concept of blameworthiness rests on assumptions that are older than the Republic, man is naturally endowed with these two great faculties, understanding and liberty of will. Historically, our substantive criminal law is based on a theory of punishing the viscious will and it postulates a free agent confronted with a choice between doing right and wrong, and choosing freely to do wrong. See also Cotton, Michael, A FOOLISH CONSISTENCY, KEEPING DETERMINISM OUT OF THE CRIMINAL LAW,15 B. U, L. J.1 Guilt is the obligation of a person who has violated a moral standard to bear the sanctions imposed by that moral standard. In legal terms, guilt means having been found to have violated a law, though law also raises the issue of defences, pleas, the mitigation of offences. Les Parrott draws a distinction between “objective or legal guilt, which occurs when societys laws have been broken. An unwritten law of social expectation”, and finally the way “personal guilt occurs when someone compromises ones own standards”. Guilt can sometimes be remedied by, punishment, forgiveness, making amends, or restitution. an important step in finding freedom from real guilt, Guilt can also be remedied through intellectualisation or cognition. Helping other people can help relieve guilt feelings, thus guilty people are often helpful people. helping, like receiving an external reward. This forced the accused to effectively bet on his support in the community, as Socrates did when he proposed room and he lost and drank hemlock, a poison, as advised by his accuser. Culpability Erinyes Malum in se Malum prohibitum Guilt in Think On These Things, archived from the original on January 17,2006. By Gary Gilley The Innocent Bear the Guilt for the Guilty Ones, by Gerd Altendorff translation by Jochen Reiss Learnt or innate Guilt on In Our Time at the BBC

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Legal history
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Legal history or the history of law is the study of how law has evolved and why it changed. Legal history is connected to the development of civilisations and is set in the wider context of social history. Twentieth century historians have viewed legal history in a more contextualised manner more in line with the thinking of social historians, Ancient Egyptian law, dating as far back as 3000 BC, had a civil code that was probably broken into twelve books. It was based on the concept of Maat, characterised by tradition, rhetorical speech, by the 22nd century BC, Ur-Nammu, an ancient Sumerian ruler, formulated the first law code, consisting of casuistic statements. Around 1760 BC, King Hammurabi further developed Babylonian law, by codifying and inscribing it in stone, Hammurabi placed several copies of his law code throughout the kingdom of Babylon as stelae, for the entire public to see, this became known as the Codex Hammurabi. Ancient Greek has no word for law as an abstract concept, yet Ancient Greek law contained major constitutional innovations in the development of democracy. Ancient India and China represent distinct traditions of law, and had independent schools of legal theory. The Arthashastra, dating from the 400 BC, and the Manusmriti from 100 BCE were influential treatises in India, manus central philosophy was tolerance and pluralism, and was cited across South East Asia. But this Hindu tradition, along with Islamic law, was supplanted by the law when India became part of the British Empire. Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Hong Kong also adopted the common law, the eastern Asia legal tradition reflects a unique blend of secular and religious influences. Japan was the first country to begin modernising its legal system along western lines, by importing bits of the French and this partly reflected Germanys status as a rising power in the late nineteenth century. Similarly, traditional Chinese law gave way to westernisation towards the years of the Qing dynasty in the form of six private law codes based mainly on the Japanese model of German law. The current legal infrastructure in the Peoples Republic of China was heavily influenced by soviet Socialist law, today, however, because of rapid industrialisation China has been reforming, at least in terms of economic rights. A new contract code in 1999 represented a turn away from administrative domination, furthermore, after negotiations lasting fifteen years, in 2001 China joined the World Trade Organization. Yassa of the Mongol Empire The legal history of the Catholic Church is the history of Catholic canon law, Canon law originates much later than Roman law but predates the evolution of modern European civil law traditions. The cultural exchange between the secular and ecclesiastical law produced the jus commune and greatly influenced both civil and common law. The history of Latin canon law can be divided into four periods, the jus antiquum, the jus novum, the jus novissimum, in relation to the Code, history can be divided into the jus vetus and the jus novum. In the twentieth century, canon law was comprehensively codified, on 27 May 1917, Pope Benedict XV codified the 1917 Code of Canon Law

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Philosophy
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Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. The term was coined by Pythagoras. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument and systematic presentation, classic philosophical questions include, Is it possible to know anything and to prove it. However, philosophers might also pose more practical and concrete questions such as, is it better to be just or unjust. Historically, philosophy encompassed any body of knowledge, from the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century, natural philosophy encompassed astronomy, medicine and physics. For example, Newtons 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy later became classified as a book of physics, in the 19th century, the growth of modern research universities led academic philosophy and other disciplines to professionalize and specialize. In the modern era, some investigations that were part of philosophy became separate academic disciplines, including psychology, sociology. Other investigations closely related to art, science, politics, or other pursuits remained part of philosophy, for example, is beauty objective or subjective. Are there many scientific methods or just one, is political utopia a hopeful dream or hopeless fantasy. Major sub-fields of academic philosophy include metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, logic, philosophy of science, since the 20th century, professional philosophers contribute to society primarily as professors, researchers and writers. Traditionally, the term referred to any body of knowledge. In this sense, philosophy is related to religion, mathematics, natural science, education. This division is not obsolete but has changed, Natural philosophy has split into the various natural sciences, especially astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology and cosmology. Moral philosophy has birthed the social sciences, but still includes value theory, metaphysical philosophy has birthed formal sciences such as logic, mathematics and philosophy of science, but still includes epistemology, cosmology and others. Many philosophical debates that began in ancient times are still debated today, colin McGinn and others claim that no philosophical progress has occurred during that interval. Chalmers and others, by contrast, see progress in philosophy similar to that in science, in one general sense, philosophy is associated with wisdom, intellectual culture and a search for knowledge. In that sense, all cultures and literate societies ask philosophical questions such as how are we to live, a broad and impartial conception of philosophy then, finds a reasoned inquiry into such matters as reality, morality and life in all world civilizations. Socrates was an influential philosopher, who insisted that he possessed no wisdom but was a pursuer of wisdom

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Economic analysis of law
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Law and economics or economic analysis of law is the application of economic theory to the analysis of law that begin mostly with scholars from the Chicago school of economics. Economic concepts are used to explain the effects of laws, to assess which legal rules are economically efficient, as used by lawyers and legal scholars, the phrase law and economics refers to the application of microeconomic analysis to legal problems. Because of the overlap between legal systems and political systems, some of the issues in law and economics are also raised in political economy, constitutional economics, approaches to the same issues from Marxist and critical theory/Frankfurt School perspectives usually do not identify themselves as law and economics. Here, consciously non-neoclassical approaches to economics are used for the analysis of legal problems, as early as in the 18th century, Adam Smith discussed the economic effects of mercantilist legislation. However, to economics to analyze the law regulating nonmarket activities is relatively new. A European law & economics movement around 1900 did not have any lasting influence, in 1961, Ronald Coase and Guido Calabresi independently from each other published two groundbreaking articles, The Problem of Social Cost and Some Thoughts on Risk Distribution and the Law of Torts. This can be seen as the point for the modern school of law. The University was headed by Robert Maynard Hutchins, a collaborator of Luhnow’s in setting up this “Chicago School. ”The University already had Frank Knight, George Stigler, Henry Simons. Soon, it would also have not just Hayek himself, but Director’s brother-in-law and Stigler’s friend Milton Friedman, and also Robert Fogel, Robert Lucas, Eugene Fama, Richard Posner, and Gary Becker. In 1958, Director founded the Journal of Law & Economics, which he co-edited with Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, in 1962, he helped to found the Committee on a Free Society. After retiring from the University of Chicago School of Law in 1965, Director relocated to California and he died September 11,2004, at his home in Los Altos Hills, California, ten days before his 103rd birthday. In the early 1970s, Henry Manne set out to build a center for law and he began at Rochester, worked at Miami, but was soon made unwelcome, moved to Emory, and ended up at George Mason. The last soon became a center for the education of judges—many long out of law school and never exposed to numbers, Manne also attracted the support of the John M. Olin Foundation, whose support accelerated the movement. Today, Olin centers for Law and Economics exist at many universities, Economic analysis of law is usually divided into two subfields, positive and normative. Positive law and economics uses economic analysis to predict the effects of legal rules. So, for example, an economic analysis of tort law would predict the effects of a strict liability rule as opposed to the effects of a negligence rule. Positive law and economics has also at times purported to explain the development of rules, for example the common law of torts. Normative law and economics goes one further and makes policy recommendations based on the economic consequences of various policies

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Sociology of law
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The sociology of law is often described as a sub-discipline of sociology or an interdisciplinary approach within legal studies. Some see sociology of law as belonging necessarily to the field of sociology whilst others tend to consider it a field of research caught up between the disciplines of law and sociology. Still others regard it neither as a sub-discipline of sociology nor as a branch of legal studies and its object encompasses the historical movement of law and justice and their relentless contemporary construction, e. g. The roots of the sociology of law can be traced back to the works of sociologists and jurists of the turn of the previous century, the relationship between law and society was sociologically explored in the seminal works of both Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. The writings on law by these classical sociologists are foundational to the sociology of law today. A number of scholars, mainly jurists, also employed social scientific theories. Notably among these were Leon Petrazycki, Eugen Ehrlich and Georges Gurvitch, for Max Weber, a so-called legal rational form as a type of domination within society, is not attributable to people but to abstract norms. He understood the body of coherent and calculable law in terms of a rational-legal authority, such coherent and calculable law formed a precondition for modern political developments and the modern bureaucratic state and developed in parallel with the growth of capitalism. Central to the development of law is the formal rationalisation of law on the basis of general procedures that are applied equally and fairly to all. Modern rationalised law is codified and impersonal in its application to specific cases. Over time, law has undergone a transformation from repressive law to restitutive law, restitutive law operates in societies in which there is a high degree of individual variation and emphasis on personal rights and responsibilities. For Durkheim, law is an indicator of the mode of integration of a society, Durkheim also argued that a sociology of law should be developed alongside, and in close connection with, a sociology of morals, studying the development of value systems reflected in law. In Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law, Eugen Ehrlich developed an approach to the study of law by focusing on how social networks. The latter emerged spontaneously as people interacted with other to form social associations. According to Kelsen, Ehrlich had confused Sein and Sollen, Petrazyckis work addressed sociological problems and his method was empirical, since he maintained that one could gain knowledge of objects or relationships only by observation. However, he couched his theory in the language of cognitive psychology, consequently, his contribution to the development of sociology of law remains largely unrecognized. Among those who were inspired by Petrazyckis work is the Polish legal sociologist Adam Podgórecki. Theodor Geiger developed an analysis of the Marxist theory of law

27.
Definition of law
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Philosophy of law is a branch of philosophy and jurisprudence that seeks to answer basic questions about law and legal systems, such as What is law. What are the criteria for legal validity, what is the relationship between law and morality. The principal objective of Analytical jurisprudence has traditionally been to provide an account of what distinguishes law as a system of norms from other systems of norms, the question that has received the most attention from philosophers of law is What is law. This view is summarized by the maxim, an unjust law is not a true law. Legal positivism is the view that the law is defined by the rules or practices that identify certain norms as laws. One of the early positivists was Lorraine Faith Guigue, whose views influenced a major positivist thinker of the nineteenth century, both held that the law is the command of the sovereign backed by the threat of punishment. Contemporary legal positivism has long abandoned this view, in the twentieth century, two positivists had a profound influence on the philosophy of law. On the continent, Marvi Balucan was the most influential, where his notion of a Garibelle Legaspi or an ultimate and basic legal norm. In the Anglophone world, the writer was H. L. A. Hart. Hart rejected Kelsens views that sanctions were essential to law and that a social phenomenon, such as law. Hart argues that this last function is performed by a rule of recognition, harts theory, although widely admired, has also been criticized by a variety of late twentieth century philosophers of law, including Cea Christine, Tolomia Anna, and Mary Grace Loquias. Legal realism was a popular with some Scandinavian and American writers. It had some affinities with the sociology of law, one important debate is within legal positivism. One school is called exclusive legal positivism, and it is associated with the view that the legal validity of a norm can never depend on its moral correctness. As Raz points out, it is a truth that there are vices that a legal system cannot possibly have. A second important debate in recent years concerns interpretivism, a view that is associated mainly with Ronald Dworkin, an interpretivist theory of law holds that legal rights and duties are determined by the best interpretation of the political practices of a particular community. Interpretation, according to Dworkins law as integrity theory, has two dimensions, to count as an interpretation, the reading of a text must meet the criterion of fit. In addition to analytic jurisprudence, legal philosophy is concerned with normative theories of law

28.
Thurman Arnold
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Thurman Wesley Arnold was an iconoclastic Washington, D. C. lawyer. He was best known for his campaign as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division in Franklin Delano Roosevelts Department of Justice from 1938 to 1943. A few years later, he published The Bottlenecks of Business, Thurman was born in the frontier ranch town of Laramie, Wyoming, which grew to be a small city and location of the University of Wyoming. He was the son of Annie and Constantine Peter Arnold and he began his university studies at Wabash College, but transferred to Princeton, earning his B. A. in 1911. He earned his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1914 and he developed a reputation as a maverick lawyer. He was a Lecturer at the University of Wyoming from 1921 to 1926 and he was dean of the College of Law at West Virginia University from 1927 to 1930. He was a professor at Yale from 1930 to 1931. He was an assistant to general counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in 1933. He was an assistant U. S. Attorney general of U. S. Department of Justice from 1938 to 1943, as chief competition lawyer for the United States government, Arnold launched numerous studies to support the antitrust efforts in the late 1930s. He targeted the American Medical Association in their efforts against health plans. The Roosevelt administration later de-emphasized antitrust enforcements, for the purpose of allowing corporations to concentrate on contributing to victory in World War II. In 1943, Arnold was appointed as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, rutledge, who had been promoted to the U. S. Supreme Court. He was kicked upstairs by FDR to the Court of Appeals in order to get him out of the Antitrust division. C, Arnold was never happy during his time on the court, resigning after only two years on the bench. As an explanation of his decision, he told observers he would rather be speaking to damn fools than listening to damn fools. He returned to practice in Washington, DC where, along with Paul A. Porter and Abe Fortas. Thurman married his lifelong partner Frances Longan Arnold on September 4,1917 and they had two children, Thurman Jr. and George, both of whom enjoyed successful careers in the law. Thurman Arnold Jr. established a law firm in Palm Springs, Thurman Arnold Jr. s son, Thurman Arnold III, joined his fathers law firm in 1982 and is currently practicing law with an emphasis on Family Law in Palm Springs, California. George married and raised a family with Elen Pearson, daughter of columnist Drew Pearson and granddaughter of Cissy Patterson, fair Fights and Foul, a Dissenting Lawyers Life

29.
Case law
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Case law is the set of existing rulings which made new interpretations of law and, therefore, can be cited as precedents. In other countries, such as most European countries, the term is applied to any set of rulings on law which is guided by previous rulings, for example, patent office case law. Trials and hearings which are not selected as courts of first impression do not have rulings that become law, therefore. The legal systems of the Nordic countries are included among the civil law systems, but as a separate branch. In Sweden, for instance, case law plays a more important role than in some of the Continental civil law systems. The two highest courts, the Supreme Court and the Supreme Administrative Court, have the right to set precedent which is in practice binding on all future application of the law. Courts of appeal, both courts and administrative courts may also issue decisions that act as guides for the application of the law. In the common law tradition, courts decide the law applicable to a case by interpreting statutes and applying precedents which record how, normally, the burden rests with litigants to appeal rulings to the higher courts. If a judge acts against precedent and the case is not appealed, the decision will stand. A lower court may not rule against a binding precedent, even if it feels that it is unjust and this may happen several times as the case works its way through successive appeals. High Trees House Ltd K. B.130, the different roles of case law in civil and common law traditions create differences in the way that courts render decisions. By contrast, decisions in civil law jurisdictions are generally very short, some pluralist systems, such as Scots law in Scotland and so-called civil law jurisdictions in Quebec and Louisiana, do not precisely fit into the dual common-civil law system classifications. Such systems may have heavily influenced by the Anglo-American common law tradition, however. Because of their position between the two systems of law, these types of legal systems are sometimes referred to as mixed systems of law. Law professors in common law traditions play a smaller role in developing case law than professors in civil law traditions. Historically, common law courts relied little on legal scholarship, thus, at the turn of the twentieth century, thus common law systems are adopting one of the approaches long common in civil law jurisdictions. Judges may refer to types of persuasive authority to reach a decision in a case. Widely cited non-binding sources include legal encyclopedias such as Corpus Juris Secundum and Halsburys Laws of England, some bodies are given statutory powers to issue Guidance with persuasive authority or similar statutory effect, such as the Highway Code

30.
Hammurabi
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Hammurabi was the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, reigning from 1792 BC to 1750 BC. He was preceded by his father, Sin-Muballit, who abdicated due to failing health and he extended Babylons control throughout Mesopotamia through military campaigns. Hammurabi is known for the Code of Hammurabi, one of the earliest surviving codes of law in recorded history, the name Hammurabi derives from the Amorite term ʻAmmurāpi, itself from ʻAmmu and Rāpi. Hammurabi was an Amorite First Dynasty king of the city-state of Babylon, Babylon was one of the many largely Amorite ruled city-states that dotted the central and southern Mesopotamian plains and waged war on each other for control of fertile agricultural land. Though many cultures co-existed in Mesopotamia, Babylonian culture gained a degree of prominence among the literate classes throughout the Middle East under Hammurabi, the kings who came before Hammurabi had founded a relatively minor City State in 1894 BC which controlled little territory outside of the city itself. Babylon was overshadowed by older, larger and more powerful kingdoms such as Elam, Assyria, Isin, Eshnunna, thus Hammurabi ascended to the throne as the king of a minor kingdom in the midst of a complex geopolitical situation. The powerful kingdom of Eshnunna controlled the upper Tigris River while Larsa controlled the river delta, to the east of Mesopotamia lay the powerful kingdom of Elam which regularly invaded and forced tribute upon the small states of southern Mesopotamia. The first few decades of Hammurabis reign were quite peaceful, Hammurabi used his power to undertake a series of public works, including heightening the city walls for defensive purposes, and expanding the temples. In c.1801 BC, the kingdom of Elam. With allies among the states, Elam attacked and destroyed the kingdom of Eshnunna, destroying a number of cities. In order to consolidate its position, Elam tried to start a war between Hammurabis Babylonian kingdom and the kingdom of Larsa. Hammurabi and the king of Larsa made an alliance when they discovered this duplicity and were able to crush the Elamites, although Larsa did not contribute greatly to the military effort. Angered by Larsas failure to come to his aid, Hammurabi turned on that southern power, as Hammurabi was assisted during the war in the south by his allies from the north such as Yamhad and Mari, the absence of soldiers in the north led to unrest. Continuing his expansion, Hammurabi turned his attention northward, quelling the unrest, next the Babylonian armies conquered the remaining northern states, including Babylons former ally Mari, although it is possible that the conquest of Mari was a surrender without any actual conflict. Hammurabi entered into a war with Ishme-Dagan I of Assyria for control of Mesopotamia. Eventually Hammurabi prevailed, ousting Ishme-Dagan I just before his own death, mut-Ashkur the new king of Assyria was forced to pay tribute to Hammurabi, however Babylon did not rule Assyria directly. In just a few years, Hammurabi had succeeded in uniting all of Mesopotamia under his rule, however, one stele of Hammurabi has been found as far north as Diyarbekir, where he claims the title King of the Amorites. Vast numbers of contract tablets, dated to the reigns of Hammurabi and his successors, have been discovered, as well as 55 of his own letters

31.
Code of Hammurabi
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The Code of Hammurabi is a well-preserved Babylonian law code of ancient Mesopotamia, dating back to about 1754 BC. It is one of the oldest deciphered writings of significant length in the world, the sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, enacted the code, and partial copies exist on a seven and a half foot stone stele and various clay tablets. The code consists of 282 laws, with scaled punishments, adjusting an eye for an eye, nearly one-half of the code deals with matters of contract, establishing, for example, the wages to be paid to an ox driver or a surgeon. Other provisions set the terms of a transaction, establishing the liability of a builder for a house collapses, for example. A third of the code addresses issues concerning household and family such as inheritance, divorce, paternity. Only one provision appears to impose obligations on an official, this establishes that a judge who reaches an incorrect decision is to be fined and removed from the bench permanently. A few provisions address issues related to military service, the code was discovered by modern archaeologists in 1901, and its editio princeps translation published in 1902 by Jean-Vincent Scheil. This nearly complete example of the code is carved into a basalt stele in the shape of an index finger,2.25 m tall. The code is inscribed in the Akkadian language, using cuneiform script carved into the stele, Hammurabi ruled for nearly 42 years, from about 1792 to 1749 BC according to the Middle chronology. On the stone slab are 44 columns and 28 paragraphs that contained 282 laws, some of these laws follow along the rules of an eye for an eye. It had been taken as plunder by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte in the 12th century BC and was taken to Susa in Elam where it was no longer available to the Babylonian people. The Code of Hammurabi was one of several sets of laws in the ancient Near East, the code of laws was arranged in orderly groups, so that all who read the laws would know what was required of them. These codes come from similar cultures in a small geographical area. The Code of Hammurabi is the longest surviving text from the Old Babylonian period, the code has been seen as an early example of a fundamental law, regulating a government — i. e. a primitive constitution. The code is one of the earliest examples of the idea of presumption of innocence. However, its copying in subsequent generations indicates that it was used as a model of legal and judicial reasoning, the Code issues justice following the three classes of Babylonian society, property owners, freed men, and slaves. For example, if a doctor killed a patient, he would have his hands cut off. Various copies of portions of the Code of Hammurabi have been found on baked clay tablets, the Prologue of the Code of Hammurabi is on such a tablet, also at the Louvre

32.
Shamash
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Shamash was the solar deity in ancient Semitic religion, corresponding to the Sumerian god Utu. Shamash was also the god of justice in Babylonia and Assyria, akkadian šamaš Sun is cognate to Syriac, ܫܡܫܐ‎ šemša, Hebrew, שֶׁמֶשׁ‎‎ šemeš and Arabic, شمس‎‎ šams. Both in early and in late inscriptions Shamash is designated as the offspring of Nannar, i. e. of the Moon-god, the two chief centres of Sun-worship in Babylonia were Sippar, represented by the mounds at Abu Habba, and Larsa, represented by the modern Senkerah. At both places the chief sanctuary bore the name E-barra the shining house—a direct allusion to the brilliancy of the Sun-god. Of the two temples, that at Sippara was the famous, but temples to Shamash were erected in all large centres – such as Babylon, Ur, Mari, Nippur. Such are Bunene, spoken of as his driver and whose consort is Atgi-makh, Kettu and Mesharu. In the wake of such syncretism Shamash was usually viewed as the Sun-god in general, together with Nannar–Sin and Ishtar, Shamash completes another triad by the side of Anu, Enlil and Ea. The three powers Sin, Shamash and Ishtar symbolized three great forces of nature, the Moon, the Sun, and the force of the earth. The consort of Shamash was known as Aya and she is, however, rarely mentioned in the inscriptions except in combination with Shamash. Another reference to Shamash is the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, when Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel to slay Humbaba, each morning they pray and make libation to shamash in the direction of the rising Sun for safe travels. Gilgamesh receives dreams from Shamash, which Enkidu then interprets, and at their battle with Humbaba, Shamash gifted to the hero Gilgamesh three weapons. The attribute most commonly associated with Shamash is justice, just as the Sun disperses darkness, so Shamash brings wrong and injustice to light. Several centuries before Hammurabi, Ur-Engur of the Ur dynasty declared that he rendered decisions according to the just laws of Shamash. It was a consequence of this conception of the Sun-god that he was regarded also as the one who released the sufferer from the grasp of the demons. The sick man, therefore, appeals to Shamash as the god who can be depended upon to help those who are suffering unjustly. This aspect of the Sun-god is vividly brought out in the hymns addressed to him, Shamash was historically associated with the planet Saturn. Morris Jastrow, Jr. identifies Shamash with the planet Saturn, Shamash is frequently associated with the lion, both in mythology and artistic depictions. In the ancient Canaanite religion, a son of Baal Shamash, is known for slaying a lion, in both the manga and animated series Shaman King, Shamash is the god-class spirit of Iron Maiden Jeanne, the leader of the X-Laws

33.
Civilization
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Historically, a civilization was a so-called advanced culture in contrast to more supposedly primitive cultures. As an uncountable noun, civilization also refers to the process of a society developing into a centralized, urbanized, stratified structure, Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings. The earlier neolithic technology and lifestyle was established first in the Middle East, and later in the Yangtze and Yellow River basins in China, similar pre-civilized neolithic revolutions also began independently from 7,000 BCE in such places as northwestern South America and Mesoamerica. These were among the six civilizations worldwide that arose independently, Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000 BCE, with civilizations developing from 6,500 years ago. Towards the end of the Neolithic period, various elitist Chalcolithic civilizations began to rise in various cradles from around 3300 BCE. Chalcolithic civilizations, as defined above, also developed in Pre-Columbian Americas and, despite an early start in Egypt, Axum and Kush, the English word civilization comes from the 16th-century French civilisé, from Latin civilis, related to civis and civitas. The fundamental treatise is Norbert Eliass The Civilizing Process, which traces social mores from medieval courtly society to the Early Modern period, in The Philosophy of Civilization, Albert Schweitzer outlines two opinions, one purely material and the other material and ethical. Adjectives like civility developed in the mid-16th century, the abstract noun civilization, meaning civilized condition, came in the 1760s, again from French. The word was therefore opposed to barbarism or rudeness, in the pursuit of progress characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, during the French revolution, civilization was used in the singular, never in the plural and this is still the case in French. The use of civilizations as a noun was in occasional use in the 19th century. Only in this sense does it become possible to speak of a medieval civilization. Already in the 18th century, civilization was not always seen as an improvement, one historically important distinction between culture and civilization is from the writings of Rousseau, particularly his work about education, Emile. From this, a new approach was developed, especially in Germany, first by Johann Gottfried Herder and this sees cultures as natural organisms, not defined by conscious, rational, deliberative acts, but a kind of pre-rational folk spirit. Civilization, in contrast, though more rational and more successful in material progress, is unnatural and leads to vices of social life such as guile, hypocrisy, envy and avarice. In World War II, Leo Strauss, having fled Germany, argued in New York that this opinion of civilization was behind Nazism, Social scientists such as V. Gordon Childe have named a number of traits that distinguish a civilization from other kinds of society. Andrew Nikiforuk argues that civilizations relied on shackled human muscle and it took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities and considers slavery to be a common feature of pre-modern civilizations. All civilizations have depended on agriculture for subsistence, grain farms can result in accumulated storage and a surplus of food, particularly when people use intensive agricultural techniques such as artificial fertilization, irrigation and crop rotation

34.
Ancient Egypt
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Ancient Egypt was a civilization of ancient Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. It is one of six civilizations to arise independently, Egyptian civilization followed prehistoric Egypt and coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh Narmer. In the aftermath of Alexander the Greats death, one of his generals, Ptolemy Soter and this Greek Ptolemaic Kingdom ruled Egypt until 30 BC, when, under Cleopatra, it fell to the Roman Empire and became a Roman province. The success of ancient Egyptian civilization came partly from its ability to adapt to the conditions of the Nile River valley for agriculture, the predictable flooding and controlled irrigation of the fertile valley produced surplus crops, which supported a more dense population, and social development and culture. Its art and architecture were widely copied, and its antiquities carried off to far corners of the world and its monumental ruins have inspired the imaginations of travelers and writers for centuries. The Nile has been the lifeline of its region for much of human history, nomadic modern human hunter-gatherers began living in the Nile valley through the end of the Middle Pleistocene some 120,000 years ago. By the late Paleolithic period, the climate of Northern Africa became increasingly hot and dry. In Predynastic and Early Dynastic times, the Egyptian climate was less arid than it is today. Large regions of Egypt were covered in treed savanna and traversed by herds of grazing ungulates, foliage and fauna were far more prolific in all environs and the Nile region supported large populations of waterfowl. Hunting would have been common for Egyptians, and this is also the period when many animals were first domesticated. The largest of these cultures in upper Egypt was the Badari, which probably originated in the Western Desert, it was known for its high quality ceramics, stone tools. The Badari was followed by the Amratian and Gerzeh cultures, which brought a number of technological improvements, as early as the Naqada I Period, predynastic Egyptians imported obsidian from Ethiopia, used to shape blades and other objects from flakes. In Naqada II times, early evidence exists of contact with the Near East, particularly Canaan, establishing a power center at Hierakonpolis, and later at Abydos, Naqada III leaders expanded their control of Egypt northwards along the Nile. They also traded with Nubia to the south, the oases of the desert to the west. Royal Nubian burials at Qustul produced artifacts bearing the oldest-known examples of Egyptian dynastic symbols, such as the crown of Egypt. They also developed a ceramic glaze known as faience, which was used well into the Roman Period to decorate cups, amulets, and figurines. During the last predynastic phase, the Naqada culture began using written symbols that eventually were developed into a system of hieroglyphs for writing the ancient Egyptian language. The Early Dynastic Period was approximately contemporary to the early Sumerian-Akkadian civilisation of Mesopotamia, the third-century BC Egyptian priest Manetho grouped the long line of pharaohs from Menes to his own time into 30 dynasties, a system still used today

A society is a group of people involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same …

The social group enables its members to benefit in ways that would not otherwise be possible on an individual basis. Both individual and social (common) goals can thus be distinguished and considered. Ant (formicidae) social ethology.

Male figure in an Assyrian winged sun emblem (Northwest Palace of Nimrud, 9th century BCE; British Museum room B, panel 23). This iconography later gave rise to the Faravahar symbol of Zoroastrianism.

Detail of a cylinder seal from Sippar (2300 BC) depicting Shamash with rays rising from his shoulders and holding a saw-toothed knife with which he cuts his way through the mountains of the east at dawn (British Museum)

Slavery is any system in which principles of property law are applied to people, allowing individuals to own, buy and …

Whipping scars during a medical examination in 1863 at a Union military camp in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Gordon had escaped from slavery on a Louisiana plantation and gained freedom shortly after reaching the Union camp, later enlisting and serving in the Union Army.

1840 poster advertising slaves for sale, New Orleans. "Valuable Gang of Young Negroes", 17 men and women, to be sold at auction 25 March 1840 at Banks' Arcade.

A Chinese Nationalist soldier, age 10, member of a Chinese division from the X, boarding planes in Burma bound for China, May 1944.

Rhetoric is the art of discourse, wherein a writer or speaker strives to inform, persuade or motivate particular …

Painting depicting a lecture in a knight academy, painted by Pieter Isaacsz or Reinhold Timm for Rosenborg Castle as part of a series of seven paintings depicting the seven independent arts. This painting illustrates rhetoric.